Menu Icon

Debt Rattle August 4 2026

Aug 042026
 
 August 4, 2026  Posted by at 8:52 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  23 Responses »


Otto Dix The Triumph of Death 1934


• Trump Says Iran Faces ‘Decapitation’ If It Doesn’t Sign A ‘Good’ Deal (ZH)
• Trump Says US And Iran In Talks, Even If Tehran Denies It (TASS)
• Iran’s Regime Demands Full Control of Strait of Hormuz (Catherine Salgado)
• Truth Social Starts Selling Fast Access To Trump Posts (RT)
• Anthony Fauci, Our Own Wizard of Oz (Clarice Feldman)
• Fauci’s Worst Nightmare Is Fauci! (James Zumwalt)
• The Confession of Joe Biden (Turley)
• Everybody Knows (James Howard Kunstler)
• Don’t Be Fooled, What’s Going On Is an Invasion of Spain (Rebecca Downs)
• Kiev’s ‘Terrorist Plague’ Spreading Across Europe – Russian Embassy (RT)
• Manufacturing Index Reflects Continued Strong Growth – Highest in 4 Years (CTH)
• Javier Milei Just Proposed a Great Idea (Anderson)

 


 

https://twitter.com/real_EBS_/status/2083557271749959771?s=20

 


 


“When we talk we say ‘we’re talking’, if we’re not talking, when you ask me, ‘no we’re not talking’, I’ll say it. But we are talking right now, we’re talking, and we’re talking at the request of Iran..”

• Trump Says Iran Faces ‘Decapitation’ If It Doesn’t Sign A ‘Good’ Deal (ZH)

President Trump has told reporters in the Oval Office that the Iran conflict is “working out very well” and that this is Tehran’s “last chance to sign a good document”. On Hormuz, he said: “It has to be [free], I am not going to let them charge. If anybody is going to charge, we will charge, we are the ones … with a total control,” he said. “We have a thing called a blockade … No, no, there is not going to be charging. We are not talking about charging at all. There won’t be charging.”


On engaging Iran in talks even while the Iranians themselves insist they will not participate in any new talks:

“When we talk we say ‘we’re talking’, if we’re not talking, when you ask me, ‘no we’re not talking’, I’ll say it. But we are talking right now, we’re talking, and we’re talking at the request of Iran, backed by Saudi Arabia, backed by UAE, and backed by Qatar in particular, but others also, many countries called, many-the leaders of many, I’m friendly with a lot of them–This is a last chance, this is not something-if it doesn’t happen, this is a last chance for them to sign a… good document.”

Curiously, Trump is again insisting that when Iran says talks are off, they are lying…

Trump: Looking for Solution ‘Caused’ by Iran
President Trump on Monday issued a new Truth Social, perhaps trying to explain his latest weekend TACO move, accusing Iran’s leadership of being “unbelievably duplicitous,” claiming Tehran privately sought and sheduled talks while publicly insisting it is only dealing with Oman. He asserted that the Strait of Hormuz is already “completely controlled by the United States Navy” through what he called the “United States Wall of Steel,” adding that “nothing gets through to Iran” unless Washington allows it. Trump also insisted discussions toward a resolution are underway despite Iranian denials, while reiterating his bottom line: “IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”

U.S. officials say that no novel negotiations are scheduled with Iran despite Trump’s statements, maintaining that ongoing talks are limited to indirect discussions via mediators involving envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. – CBS. Trump is increasingly letting his frustration and ‘exasperation’ go public. This seems to only confirm that indeed there are no talks taking place at this point. The US president continues to insist that the whole crisis was “caused” by the Iranians “for decades” but that it is the US now looking for a “solution” – but Iran won’t play ball, after apparently ‘begging’ for talks…

Read more …

The US president said the sides are “talking of a solution to a problem” that Tehran have caused ..

• Trump Says US And Iran In Talks, Even If Tehran Denies It (TASS)

US President Donald Trump said that the United States and Iran are holding negotiations, even if Tehran does not publicly acknowledge it.”They ask for a meeting, some would say ‘beg’, talks begin, with more scheduled in the immediate future, and they say, openly and proudly, that they’re not having any discussions, that nothing is being talked about, and they’re only dealing with Oman,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Whether Iran wants to admit it or not, we are, in fact, talking of a solution to a problem that they have caused, for decades. It is very simple, IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”
Read more …

“Mine-clearing is Iran’s sole responsibility,” he claimed, meaning the mullahs want the mines to remain where they are and terrorize ships.”

• Iran’s Regime Demands Full Control of Strait of Hormuz (Catherine Salgado)

Just before the end of July, an official of the terrorist Iranian regime once again insisted that the current conflict cannot end until and unless the U.S. concedes the murderous mullahs full and uncontested control—and likely toll power—over the Strait of Hormuz.


It is very important to understand that no matter how many times the Iranian regime says it is willing to look at a proposal from the United States in order to put off major strikes, that doesn’t mean the regime ever changes its core demands. Nor will it ever do so, because the regime is run by fundamentalist Muslims who believe that by waging endless jihad against the United States, they are triggering the coming of their Islamic messiah, the Mahdi.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs Kazem Gharibabadi gave an interview July 28 during which he laid out Iran’s demands. “We submitted a proposal to Oman regarding the Strait of Hormuz to establish a new lane that will be under Iranian control,” Gharibabadi said, according to a translation published on the Middle East Media Research Institute. “If this proposal is accepted, the strait will be opened; but if it is rejected, we are ready for a resumption of the fighting.”

U.S., of course, rejected the proposal. Despite what Gharibabadi said, Iranian forces have not succeeded in closing the strait to all commercial traffic, but they have made it impossible to get through the strait without the security that American troops are providing. And the Iranian strikes still occasionally hit or hinder ships.

Gharibabadi insisted, “The Strait of Hormuz will not revert to the pre-war arrangements, and this is the absolute policy of the [Iranian] regime.” He then griped about Americans trying to clear Iranian mines from the strait. “Mine-clearing is Iran’s sole responsibility,” he claimed, meaning the mullahs want the mines to remain where they are and terrorize ships.

Then Gharibabadi declared, “The Americans, in cooperation with Oman, created a southern transit lane within Omani territorial waters for ship traffic. Iran does not recognize this southern lane for even one hour, and the current round of fighting began precisely because of ships illegally passing through this lane.” Notice Gharibabadi fully admits the waters are Omani territory but still claims sovereignty over them. The Iranian regime is imperialist and lawless.

The ayatollahs aren’t interested in compromise. “The Omanis suggested planning a transit lane of which 50% would be under Iranian control and 50% under Omani control,” Gharibabadi noted. “We said that this does not dispel Iran’s apprehensions. Our demand is for complete Iranian control over the inbound lane and also over part of the outbound lane. If this proposal is rejected, no other proposal will be approved and the strait will remain closed.” That is, the terrorism will continue.

For 47 years, Iranian terrorists have attacked Americans and spread jihad around the world. It’s time to finish the job.

Read more …

The president sells access to his decisions. That won’t fly.

“The sudden strike call-off followed a week of threats that helped keep crude near $90 a barrel..”

• Truth Social Starts Selling Fast Access To Trump Posts (RT)

US President Donald Trump has teased new negotiations with Iran after abruptly calling off a major attack in a Truth Social post published on the same day that his media company began selling Wall Street firms millisecond-fast access to the platform’s market-moving content. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, Trump claimed that talks would begin on Monday and said several Middle Eastern governments had urged him to give diplomacy another chance.


“We’re just going to see whether or not we can make a deal,” Trump said, claiming that the canceled operation would have been the “biggest attack since World War II.”Last Monday, Trump claimed that “very friendly negotiations” with Tehran were already underway. Within days, however, the US had resumed bombing Iran, while Trump adopted increasingly aggressive rhetoric, promising to hit the country “very hard.”His administration declared US forces “locked and loaded” and prepared to unleash levels of military power not seen since World War II.

US media reported on Friday that Washington and Israel were preparing an extensive campaign against Iranian power plants, refineries and other energy infrastructure.The threats, combined with continued disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, helped sustain fears of a wider energy shock and propelled crude prices toward $90 a barrel. On Saturday, Trump abruptly called off the strikes in a Truth Social post, claiming that Iran and several regional governments had agreed to the outlines of a deal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and address Tehran’s nuclear program.

The sudden reversal triggered another sharp market swing when Asian trading resumed on Monday morning. Brent crude fell by more than 7% at the open, while West Texas Intermediate dropped 6.7% to $78.98 a barrel. US stock-index futures rose as traders priced in a reduced risk of further escalation and disruption to Gulf energy supplies.

August 1 was also the launch date of Truth API, a paid service operated by Trump Media & Technology Group that provides institutional customers with a licensed, machine-readable feed of posts from influential Truth Social accounts. The service is aimed specifically at high-frequency and algorithmic trading firms and reportedly costs as much as $100,000 per month. Trump Media says paying customers receive posts within milliseconds of publication, while market specialists have argued that the direct feed allows well-equipped firms to process announcements and execute trades much faster than retail investors relying on the public website or app.

Trump’s posts are particularly valuable because he routinely uses Truth Social to announce abrupt changes involving wars, tariffs, individual companies and other policies capable of moving stocks, currencies and commodities. The AP noted that policy reversals can be especially lucrative for high-speed traders, who can profit from an initial threat that moves prices in one direction and then rapidly change their positions when Trump announces the opposite.

Iran has previously accused Trump of publicizing purported diplomatic breakthroughs to lower oil prices and buy time for further military action. The latest pause also follows an established pattern: Trump has repeatedly announced that strikes against Iran were being suspended to allow negotiations, only for military operations to resume after talks faltered or new attacks occurred. Tehran had not publicly confirmed that any new negotiations with the US were scheduled, and rejected Washington’s claim to a role in determining the future of the Strait of Hormuz.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said negotiations with Oman over the waterway’s management were “nearing completion,” while Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei described the discussions as a bilateral matter that “does not concern any other party.” Baqaei said Iran and Oman were negotiating a new shipping route that would replace the existing northern and southern routes. He stressed that any agreement “does not mean that the Strait of Hormuz will be opened or remain closed,” contradicting Trump’s claim that the proposed deal would provide for its “immediate, complete and total” reopening.

Read more …

“We’ve been preparing all wrong for pandemics by imagining bureaucratic wizards will manage them best. ”

• Anthony Fauci, Our Own Wizard of Oz (Clarice Feldman)

This week, the Senate Homeland Security Committee subpoenaed Dr. Anthony Fauci to testify. The committee secured extensive daily logs he had prepared while at NIH heading up the COVID-19 response. (The committee still lacks almost 700 pages of these logs, all of which had been secreted on 11 different government servers until retrieved by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.)


The contrast between what he wrote in his hidden logs and his public statements was extreme. To take but one example, he admits in the log that the six-foot distancing rule was just something made up. Here’s a video compilation of him emphatically promoting that very rule as if there were some scientific basis for it. As a reminder of the failures of the Fauci response to the virus, here’s Toby Rogers in 2024 documenting them:

By the end of the hearing, Fauci’s reputation, once burnished to a fine gleam by an adoring press, was vastly diminished:The Picture of Dorian Grey [sic] also comes to mind. Fauci guarded his reputation as a scientist just as Dorian guarded his seeming youth. To do so required a costly exchange. In both stories, the status of the soul (represented by the painting for Dorian) belies appearances. Nowhere could he have anticipated [snip] that he would be trapped in a chair in a Senate chamber, ashen and defeated, surrounded by silent lawyers, his accusers on all sides, pleading the 5th amendment 111 times. The wings completely melted. De profundis clamavi.

Classics professor Victor Davis Hanson sees the fall of Fauci as “a now all too familiar example of narcissistic and bureaucratic insiders who start with a classic rise only to fall into utter destruction.” He adds Fauci’s name to others like John Bolton, James Comey, and Jack Smith:Fueled by media flattery, and their over the top rhetoric, they posture as consummate “professionals.” These egomaniacs convince themselves they are our untouchable defenders of the established Washingtonian order, as supposedly sober and judicious custodians of the government. And when warned where they are ultimately headed, and to tread lightly, they instead interpret such sound advice as the jealousy of the envious.

In the current decade that arrogance is best manifested as crusading against public enemy number one, Donald J. Trump. So insidiously they up their Trump derangement rhetoric. They cite their titles and degrees as they vaingloriously skirt the law.

Finally drunk on leftwing media adulation, they delude themselves into believing that their megalomaniac behavior is exempt from any consequences. And then what? At the apex of their hubris, Nemesis strikes. And they fall hard by their own overweening arrogance. [snip] These unelected legends in their own minds confuse their enormous government granted powers at their disposal as bureaucrats with some sort of regal right that will exempt them from any consequences of their lawless arrogance.

And so soon they lie under oath to Congress, or call up Chinese generals to warn them about their own president, or sign patently false affidavits attesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was the work of the Ruskies, or tap senatorial phones—or almost anything that would ensure their inevitable fall from grace and utter humiliation. So too with the once celestial and now laughingstock Anthony Fauci (who once compared himself to Albert Einstein). The common denominator? The greater their arrogance, the harder they certainly fall.

You probably needn’t go back as far as Greek myth to explain what just happened. It’s as if Toto knocked over the screen and revealed that the Wizard of Oz was just a humbug. Dorothy could get back to Kansas only by tapping into her own potential. As Glinda the good witch said, “You had the power all along, dear.” And that’s the point Jeff Childers argues when he says we’ve been preparing all wrong for pandemics by imagining bureaucratic wizards will manage them best.

WHO, CDC and CMS, he argues, “framed pandemic response as a coordinated system with a ‘common operating picture.’ The whole world was enslaved to it. It all came from one delusional narcissist who was placed in charge.”Ours is a big and varied republic “fifty states, three thousand counties,” Childers reminds us.

Wherever some slight experimentation was allowed, individual states outperformed the baseline. Florida opened beaches and schools. Georgia reopened restaurants. Leftist fury ensued — “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice” — but those states did better. We did not need them to be perfect. We needed them to be different. Difference is how science learns.

We’ve been preparing for pandemics all wrong. By anointing a single man to coordinate the world’s response, we instantly created a single point of failure. If that lone apex expert is conflicted, retarded, or worse, a malignant narcissist, then, well, we can all now see the result: The Fifth Amendment invoked for questions about tie colors.

In other words, what we needed most was room to conduct experiments. The CDC should have supported states and local governments trying different things, like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. There should have been no federal guidelines, no mandates, no vaccine incentives, no censorship, no indefinite shutdowns to flatten the curve.

Just give us the data. And maybe some money. Let us handle it.

Read more …

“Do a lot of grown men keep diaries? Fauci’s own narcissism came back to haunt him.”

• Fauci’s Worst Nightmare Is Fauci! (James Zumwalt)

It was an interesting display of contempt for Senator Rand Paul exhibited by Anthony Fauci: having initially agreed to testify before the committee chaired by Paul only to change his mind, Fauci was hit with a subpoena. The main focus of the inquiry was Fauci’s public and private contrary views concerning the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin. Fauci refused to testify, claiming the Fifth Amendment—a plea which Paul reported to be invalid.


Paul opened the hearing with a list of reasons why a subpoena mandating Fauci’s testimony on the matter was warranted. He stated millions of American lives were lost due to COVID-19; that the American people had a right to know why dangerous research was funded by NIAID in a foreign country’s lab that lacked acceptable safety standards; and why Fauci steadfastly held to the public position the pandemic was not an accidental release from China’s Wuhan lab but a natural evolution. He did so while privately holding “a mountain of evidence” supporting the former—later even acknowledging it in his diary—over the latter.

(Since Fauci’s pardon is inapplicable to state crimes, some states like Florida are exploring prosecution to get at the truth. While Fauci would obviously still take the Fifth, the pardon would not shield him from prosecution and accountability.)

In making his opening statement detailing his past testimonies, Fauci ended his comments with the following allegation: [G]iven Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this Committee is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up in his words, ‘Behind bars.’

[snip] [A]lthough it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government, and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.

Fauci’s accusation was show rather than substance. He sought to hide the real reason for refusing to testify. But first, it is worth exploring the fate Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, suffered during the hearing.

It had been made clear to Schertler he should not sit at the witness table with Fauci or in any way disrupt the hearing. However, he did sit with Fauci and later sought to speak. Paul’s repeated warnings to Schertler fell on deaf ears, and Paul finally ordered the attorney’s removal by security—an action many of those present applauded.

Read more …

“Biden gave Hur a virtual confession, and Hur gave him a pass.”

• The Confession of Joe Biden (Turley)

For years, former President Joe Biden has fought to prevent the release of tapes acquired by former special counsel Robert Hur in his investigation. After those efforts collapsed this month, it became clear why Biden and his aides were so determined to keep the public from seeing the evidence. In addition to showing Biden’s mental diminution even before he was elected president, the tapes show that Biden effectively confessed to the crimes Hur would later excuse on the grounds of his mental infirmity.


Biden’s interviews with his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, conducted four years before he would be elected president, show that Biden was already having trouble remembering names and dates. Hur was tasked with determining whether Biden had committed the same crimes that led later to charges against President Trump — retaining classified material, mishandling such material, and related crimes. It turns out that Biden had already admitted to these alleged crimes, years before the documents were found in various offices and the garage of his home.

I wrote for years about Biden’s absurd denials after files were found in offices where he was working on his book. There was also evidence that the material had been divided, distributed, and transported between different locations. Despite all the evidence of knowledge and use of the classified materials, Biden and his aides suggested that no one had been aware of its removal and repeated transfer. In the meantime, after the raid on Mar-a-Lago to search for classified material removed by Trump, the Justice Department granted Biden and his team every possible accommodation.

Then came the searches of his home, with the pictures of files in his garage, office, and other locations. These included clearly marked classified material. Hur then issued his report, concluding that there was evidence of the crimes, but that he would still not charge Biden as Special Counsel Jack Smith had done with Trump. The report stated that “President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” It further stated that the clearly marked classified material was “stored in unsecure places” and posed a risk of “serious damage to America’s national security.”

For his part, Biden was defiant and, when confronted about the documents, insisted that “They’re mine,” and that other presidents had done what he did. This was the same president who condemned Trump for retaining classified information. Biden mocked Trump’s defense and asked CBS 60 Minutes how “anyone could be that irresponsible.”

We now know that Biden himself was that irresponsible, if not more so. Biden not only kept classified material longer and in even less secure locations, but he did nothing to protect the material as he attacked Trump over Mar-a-Lago. Nevertheless, Hur declared that he would not bring a single charge because Biden “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did in our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” The tapes show Biden struggling to give answers even before he announced his candidacy for the presidency, despite denials from key aides such as Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre.

However, Hur had actual tapes showing that Biden had clear memory and knowledge of his retention of classified material. Combined with Biden’s later public statements, the combination would have been deadly at trial. In the interview, Biden read “nearly verbatim” from notebooks containing sensitive national security and foreign policy information, according to Hur. On the tapes, Biden is heard saying, “So this was, I early on, um, in ’09 I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” At another point, he states, “Some of this may be classified, so be careful with it.” He repeatedly mentions that some of the items in his office and home may be classified.

He even brags to his ghostwriter, in a report made on Oct. 10, 2016, that “I have extensive notes over this period of time … They didn’t know I have this.” Once again, the Justice Department had already declared and defended in court the idea that such removal and retention of classified material did constitute a federal crime by a president, let alone a vice president. Where Trump acknowledged his retention of classified material and agreed to security measures that the FBI requested, Biden did not inform anyone of his classified materials and kept them in his garage long after the Mar-a-Lago raids.

Meanwhile, in public, he expressed shock that any president would act as recklessly as Trump. It is hard to see how any of that would present “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” It sounds more like a cynical, shrewd politician with poor ethics. It also sounds like it would have been a strong foundation for a prosecution. For many, the tapes will reinforce the view of a two-tier legal system, long maintained by the Justice Department, whereby key Democratic figures including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were given favorable treatment while others were indicted for similar conduct.

What is truly galling for some of us is that Biden knew all of this when he went public to attack Hur for suggesting that he had knowingly retained classified material and showed diminished mental faculties— at one point forgetting when his son Beau died. Biden savaged Hur at the time for raising this issue, famously demanding, “How the hell dare he raise that?” Even that was a lie, because it was Biden who had raised Beau’s death in the interview.

After the report, Biden was still denying that he had retained classified material, even though he had discussed that classified material with his ghostwriter years earlier and had admitted as much to Hur. But before the public, Biden declared, “I’ve seen headlines since the report was released about my willful retention of documents. This assertion is not only misleading, it’s just plain wrong.”The record is now largely complete. So is the inescapable conclusion: Biden lacked clarity on most everything but his alleged crimes. His deception and culpability were established in both the Zwonitzer and Hur interviews. Biden gave Hur a virtual confession, and Hur gave him a pass.

Read more …

“I underestimated how emotionally committed much of the press is to rallying around Anthony Fauci. His reputation is more important to them than anything. . .” —Matt Taibbi

No Matt, it’s about their own reputation..

• Everybody Knows (James Howard Kunstler)

The baleful afterburn of Dr. Fauci’s one-sentence testimony (“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer. . . .”) seeps over the land like some ghastly pestilence now. You couldn’t have seen a more vivid demonstration of manifest evil than the master bureaucratic grifter formerly self-styled as “The Science” stonewall his way through that fateful reckoning in Sen. Rand Paul’s committee hearing last Wednesday.


The score so far: over a million dead in America from the Covid-19 virus that Dr. Fauci helped develop starting as far back as the 1990s, with Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina. Tens of thousands left with serious, lasting injuries from the vaccines they promoted. The exact number of vaccine-connected deaths unknown because the public health agencies refused to report honestly on an operation that they caused to happen. There are whole legions of high officials and doctors behind Dr. Fauci now desperate to cover their asses.

Along with the mendacious news media. HHS Sec’y Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. happened to be on Dana Bash’s CNN Sunday morning program. By the way, Dana Bash used to be married to one Jeremy Bash, Chief-of-Staff to CIA-Director Leon Panetta under Barack Obama. CNN lied consistently to the American people during the years of the Covid emergency. You have to wonder if CNN takes direction from the CIA, or maybe rogue elements in (or retired from) the agency. Sunday, Dana Bash went on offense against RFK,Jr.

Didn’t work. RFK, Jr. kept his cool. The harshest thing he said to Bash through all her hectoring was “you were part of the problem,” a startling understatement. Ms. Bash otherwise only wrecked herself, over-speaking her guest at every opportunity, pettifogging, and filibustering. Everybody could see what she was up to. Imagine how desperate CNN was to think that Dana Bash could bluster her way over Mr. Kennedy. He helped her expose herself as a tool.

The news media has been a very active co-conspirator in the Covid operation. You’d think Senator Paul might want to subpoena some network executives from CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNOW (especially), plus Executive Editor Joe Kahn of The New York Times (and his predecessor during Covid, Dean Baquet) to find out why they reported so much pure falsehood around the so-called pandemic. How did they happen to become the propaganda department for the Democratic Party, and what was the party’s interest in the Covid operation? D’unh. . . .

Everybody knows. Even the super-hyped-up cat ladies, nose-rings, NPR stars, and moiling transsters of the lefty-left know. They have kin and friends who either died on respirators with IV lines of remdesivir in their arms, or were gifted by the vaxx shots with turbo-cancer or myocarditis or neuromuscular disease or immune system failure or some mystery illness. They have been harmed even more than those of us who declined to get vaxxed. Sooner or later, that’s got to mean something.

As for Dr. Fauci’s motive in this huge fiasco. . . it’s got to be clear both from the record of his career — nicely reported in RFK,Jr’s 2021 book The Real Doctor Fauci — and from the 1000-plus-page personal diary he recorded on the HHS computers, that Fauci was doggedly in pursuit of glory. Glory! And that his personal holy grail was to find a “universal vaccine” that could defeat any virus, so as to be acclaimed by all mankind! Glory! Glory! Glory!

Given what is understood now about viruses and their interaction with vaccines — for instance, the flu vaccine which uniformly fails to adapt to annual virus mutations — that Dr. Fauci’s quest was quixotic, very basically foolish. All he ever produced, from the AZT wonder-drug for AIDS he developed back in 1986 (that probably killed as many people as died from the disease itself) to the Pfizer / Moderna mRNA shots for Covid in 2021 . . . all that frantic, questing “science” just ended up killing and harming the credulous in large numbers. The buttoned-up little fellow appears to be guilty of mass-murder on an epic scale.

Of course, he is presumed to be protected by the autopen-signed peremptory pardon he received from minions of “Joe Biden.” Perhaps Dr. Fauci’s invoking the Fifth Amendment under those circumstances will prompt an overdue look at just how this autopen thing really worked. In any case, Dr. Fauci is liable to be voted in contempt of Congress this week for not answering any questions put to him. The connected legal procedure will keep Dr. Fauci’s misdeeds under public scrutiny for at least months to come.

It’s also a fact that the autopen pardon does not shield him from charges brought in state courts. The AGs of Florida, Louisiana, Alabama have declared investigations. Louisiana and Missouri have already made Dr. Fauci sit for depositions, and now they can compare his answers with the entries from his diary. It is obvious that on countless occasions and on many vital issues, Dr. Fauci told the public one thing while he believed (and recorded) the opposite in his diary.

One question that the public badly wants Secretary RFK,jr. to answer: how come you haven’t pulled the mRNA Covid vaccines altogether? They don’t work and they harm people. Why are they even still available? Would such a move amount to an admission that the whole emergency was a fake and a failure? And that the government’s own public health agencies are culpable? Would the survivors of the 268-million Americans who got the shots be a little pissed-off? What, then?

Read more …

The beginning of the end of open borders.

• Don’t Be Fooled, What’s Going On Is an Invasion of Spain (Rebecca Downs)

The consequences of “an ongoing invasion” from military-aged men into Spain played out in real time on Thursday, as Tony Kinnett covered on “The Tony Kinnett Cast.” Men were streaming past gates and into the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla, which border Morocco. By Friday, blood was in the streets, while invaders were breaking off parts of gravesites to attack citizens and police. Cars were also on fire.


Kinnett spoke to how “thousands of military-aged men, not packs of desperate women and children, not the elderly, military-aged men… are streaming over the border into the country and… invading people’s homes in Spanish territory.” There was even footage of one man confirming he was under investigation for murder in Morocco, which contradicts claims that such individuals are seeking “economic opportunity” and “a better life.”

“It’s not over,” Kinnett shared at the start of Friday’s broadcast, in light of claims many had returned to Morocco. “Now if there is an invasion that is over… usually you do not see people continuing to do the invading,” he added as men climbed over fences. Kinnett likened the invasion to the open borders under President Joe Biden. “Just one administration ago, you saw under Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas… the same kinds of mass migration into the country,” Kinnett reminded, about which Mayorkas couldn’t even be truthful.

President Donald Trump has called out the risks of unfettered immigration, while Democrats have been “insane,” Kinnett said.

The situation was so dire it necessitated leaders from Ceuta, on left and right, calling on Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for assistance. When Sánchez “finally” addressed the situation on Thursday, he claimed that “the government of Spain is fully committed to providing an immediate response to the situation” and were “mobilizing all necessary resources, working with Moroccan and international authorities, and preparing the necessary measures to restore normalcy as soon as possible.”

Kinnett also noted Sánchez had previously defended open borders as “compassion” and “empathy.”As Kinnett pointed out on Friday, the prime minister “was heckled immediately” in Spain. On Friday, Sánchez “for the first time” acknowledged that “what has happened is an attack on Spain’s territorial integrity” and “deserves our most resounding and energetic condemnation.”

Kinnett noted it was “an interesting line” that Sánchez said “the government of Spain stands with the autonomous city,” with Ceuta being Spanish territory, given federal law still applies there. But he’s saying autonomous as though this is somehow some extra nicety that he’s laying around. Maybe, maybe the socialists have a point that really these territories should be ceded to Morocco.”

The situation in Spain has become so bad that European neighbors could ignore it no longer and have tightened borders. “As a result… it should be very clear here that other nations in Europe have responded by reinforcing their borders,” Kinnett said, despite how there is free travel between the European Union countries. This includes the leaders of Italy, Austria, and even France, “because of this migrant crisis.”

Read more …

I find terrorism a strange complaint when you’re at war.

• Kiev’s ‘Terrorist Plague’ Spreading Across Europe – Russian Embassy (RT)

Ukraine’s “terrorist plague” is spreading across Europe, the Russian Embassy in Italy has claimed, accusing Kiev of orchestrating the deadly bombing of the Balzi Rossi restaurant in central Moscow. An improvised explosive device detonated outside the Italian restaurant on Kudrinskaya Square on Saturday evening after an unidentified woman allegedly attempted to carry it inside. The security guard who stopped her at the entrance was killed in the blast, along with the courier and at least three patrons attending a private event. Almost two dozen others were injured.


The National Antiterrorism Committee has not publicly identified any suspects or linked the attack to Ukraine, another state or any particular organization, while no group has claimed responsibility. In a statement on Sunday, the Russian Embassy in Italy claimed that the “bloody tentacles of Zelensky’s terrorist gang” had chosen Balzi Rossi partly to frighten foreigners working in Russia. It described the “Kiev regime” as “another emanation of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State” and accused Western officials who continue to fund and arm Ukraine of enabling terrorism.

“It has now become completely clear that the explosion at the Balzi Rossi restaurant and other terrorist attacks in Russia, Monaco and elsewhere show that the Ukrainian terrorist plague is already spreading across Europe, and particularly Italy,” the embassy said.Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin described the explosion as a “brutal terrorist act” and vowed that those responsible would be found and punished. Russian officials have not announced any arrests or disclosed a suspected motive, but the embassy’s allegations follow several previous bomb attacks for which Moscow explicitly blamed Ukrainian intelligence services.

Russian journalist Darya Dugina was killed in August 2022 after a bomb was planted in her vehicle. Russia’s Federal Security Service accused Ukrainian special services of organizing the assassination and identified Ukrainian national Natalya Vovk as the alleged perpetrator. According to the FSB, she fled to Estonia and has since vanished from public view. A bombing that killed military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky in St. Petersburg in April 2023 bore a more direct resemblance to the Balzi Rossi attack. Darya Trepova carried an explosive device disguised as a statuette into a café where Tatarsky was addressing an audience and presented it to him as a gift.

The device exploded shortly afterwards, killing Tatarsky and injuring dozens of people.= Russian investigators concluded that Trepova had acted on instructions from handlers in Ukraine. She maintained that she had been deceived and believed the statuette contained a listening device rather than a bomb, but a court convicted her of terrorism and sentenced her to 27 years in prison. Kiev never formally admitted involvement, but its former military intelligence chief, Kirill Budanov, later hinted that his agency was behind several high-profile killings inside Russia and promised to “keep killing Russians anywhere on the face of this world.”

Terrorism beyond Russia
The June 29 bombing in Monaco cited by the embassy also involved a woman allegedly recruited by a Ukrainian military intelligence network, according to Russian law enforcement sources. In that attack, a backpack containing an improvised explosive device packed with shrapnel was placed outside a residential building and detonated remotely, injuring Ukrainian businessman Vadim Ermolaev, his partner and her 13-year-old son.

The suspected courier, Anastasia Berezovskaya, fled to Ukraine before Interpol issued a Red Notice for her arrest. She was later found shot dead and buried near Kiev. Ukrainian authorities detained two men in connection with her killing, including Vitaly Zhikovich, whom Russian law enforcement sources described as a serving colonel in Ukraine’s military intelligence agency. Recordings obtained by RT captured Zhikovich discussing plans to recruit unsuspecting civilians, including women and minors, to transport explosives, sometimes without knowing that they would be killed when the devices detonated.

Read more …

A reminder that the US economy is not doing as bad as the likes of CNN want you to think.

• Manufacturing Index Reflects Continued Strong Growth – Highest in 4 Years (CTH)

What we can take away from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) index on manufacturing: overall, the U.S. manufacturing sector is continuing to expand significantly. The current index of 55.6 percent in July is 2.3 percentage points above the June figure and the highest reading since May 2022 (55.9 percent), when we were trying to recover from the COVID-19 shutdowns and supply chain problems.


PMI – The overall economy continued in expansion for the 21st month in a row. (A Manufacturing PMI® above 47.5 percent, over a period of time, generally indicates an expansion of the overall economy.) The New Orders Index expanded for the seventh consecutive month after four straight readings in contraction, registering 56.7 percent, up 0.7 percentage point compared to June’s figure of 56 percent.

The July reading of the Production Index (58.5 percent) is 6.3 percentage points higher than the 52.2 percent recorded in June and the highest figure since November 2021 (60.5 percent). The Prices Index remained in expansion (or ‘increasing’ territory), registering 71.1 percent, a 1.9-percentage point decrease from June’s reading of 73 percent. The Backlog of Orders Index registered 55 percent, up 4.5 percentage points compared to the 50.5 percent recorded in June.

The Employment Index reading of 52.8 percent is up 3.1 percentage points from June’s figure of 49.7 percent, putting the index in expansion territory for the first time in 33 months.” (source)All that data and a couple of bucks will buy you a cup of coffee, but here’s what it means in common speak. Overall, companies wanting to make products in the United States are expanding the manufacturing sector. However, they are running into a problem when trying to source the component goods and/or raw materials. The resource goods they need are constantly in a status of flux and the prices are unstable.

For large companies their supply chain management can deal with the short inventory issue through various sourcing networks using multiple suppliers. However, for smaller companies this is frustrating. The manufacturing system is a network of complex suppliers who make component materials needed for the core product. In order to get really successful, the smaller manufacturing component goods need to start up inside the USA just like the larger companies who are producing a finished product.

This is why even during a manufacturing surge we end up importing a lot of goods on the front end of the transition. Absent a domestic supplier, industrial component products are heavily imported in order to manufacture the finished durable good.

It takes time, well, technically its never been tried – so, no one is sure, but it takes time for all of the component manufacturing to establish inside the USA in order to feed the component parts to the various manufacturers who depend on the sub-sourcing. This is the period we are in at the moment, and prices are fluctuating as people try to get their arms around costs here and abroad.

The 15 manufacturing industries reporting growth in July — listed in order — are: Printing & Related Support Activities; Apparel, Leather & Allied Products; Electrical Equipment, Appliances & Components; Primary Metals; Nonmetallic Mineral Products; Transportation Equipment; Miscellaneous Manufacturing; Textile Mills; Machinery; Computer & Electronic Products; Food, Beverage & Tobacco Products; Wood Products; Plastics & Rubber Products; Furniture & Related Products; and Fabricated Metal Products. The only industry in contraction was Chemical Products.

[…] Commodities Up in Price Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS); Aluminum* (32); Copper (13); Corn; Corrugated Products (4); Electrical Components (2); Electronic Components (7); Freight (5); Fuel* (5); Integrated Circuits; Memory Components (5); Metal Products (4); Ocean Freight (3); Oil Based Products (4); Paper Products (4); Plastic Based Products (4); Plastics (5); Printed Circuit Boards; Resin Based Products; Resins (6); Semiconductors (2); Soybean Meal; Steel (9); Steel — Cold Rolled; Steel — Hot Rolled (7); Steel — Stainless (6); Steel Products (8); and Sulfur Products (4).

Commodities Down in Price Aluminum*(2); Fuel* (2); and Polypropylene Resin (2).

Commodities in Short Supply Aluminum; Copper; Electrical Components (13); Electronic Components (17); Integrated Circuits; Memory (7); Oil Based Products; Printed Circuit Boards; Rare Earth Components; Semiconductors (5); Steel; Steel — Hot Rolled (2); and Tungsten Products.

The blue-collar jobs are expanding significantly. There is massive upward pressure on wages for blue collar workers as the manufacturing sector continues to expand.

Read more …

It’s Warren Buffett’s idea, and he wasn’t the first either.

• Javier Milei Just Proposed a Great Idea (Anderson)

Javier Milei has done great things for Argentina — and honestly, the entire region — and will continue to do so, but I have to admit that his latest proposal left me weak in the knees. He’s calling it the grillete fiscal or the “fiscal shackle,” and it’s part of a larger reform of the Central Bank’s charter that he’s sending to the country’s Congress, possibly for a mid-to-late-August vote.


Essentially, if the Argentine national government runs a fiscal deficit for several months in a row, the Congress receives a warning that it has a matter of weeks to fix it. If it doesn’t hit the deadline, the “shackle” activates automatically, and the political class will be the ones impacted. Here’s what happens:

1. Non-essential government functions are suspended (hello, government shutdown).

2. All new spending is frozen and will not be authorized until the problem is resolved.

3. No new contracts can be awarded.

4. No new public-sector employees can be hired.

5. Discretionary transfers to the provinces are halted.

And last but not least, the best part:

6. The salaries of the top politicians stop completely. The vice president, ministers, secretaries, undersecretaries, national senators, national deputies, and even El presidente himself will not receive a dime of taxpayer money until they solve the problem.

Of course, essential services will remain protected. “For the first time in our history, if politics doesn’t do its homework, politics will pay the cost — not the people,” Milei said during a national broadcast last week, during which he introduced the proposal. My question is why the heck isn’t every national government in the world doing this? More specifically, my question is why doesn’t the United States do this? (I know the answer.)

We do have our fair share of government shutdowns when Congress can’t get its act together, but the everyday people who work for the federal government are the ones who suffer and are often furloughed without pay, while those same members of Congress continue to receive their salaries.

Now, I will point out that in May of this year, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) sponsored a resolution that would make it so that our senators are not paid in the case of a government shutdown. It had bipartisan support and was unanimously approved. It states that these senators’ salaries are withheld and released once a shutdown ends. That will take effect the day after the November 2026 elections and only applies to the Senate, not the House.

While that’s progress, it looks weak compared to what Milei has proposed. Now, his biggest hurdle is getting these legislators whom it impacts to actually vote for it. Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party has the largest bloc in the Chamber of Deputies after the 2025 midterms, but it doesn’t have an outright majority. It’s ambitious, but it’s not impossible, and if it does pass, I hope the U.S. will take note, though I’m not holding my breath.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2083927432017420393?s=20 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2083984910260294133?s=20

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle May 3 2024

May 032024
 
 May 3, 2024  Posted by at 9:11 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  39 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Avenue of Poplars at Sunset 1884

 

• Justice in a Shithole Country (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Trump Scores $1.8 Billion Windfall After Significant Increase In Truth Social Stake (ZH)
• Anti-Trump Prosecutor Pleads 5th As House GOP Probes Links To Biden DOJ (ZH)
• The US Constitution Is Another Victim of Genocide (Paul Craig Roberts)
• US Republicans Want To Oust House Speaker (RT)
• To Israel’s Horror, Hamas Brings ‘Two-state Solution’ Back Into Focus (Cradle)
• Of Journalists, Students and Power (Patrick Lawrence)
• Jews Did Not Kill Jesus – US House of Representatives (RT)
• Second Boeing Whistleblower Dies Suddenly (RT)
• Hungary Rejects €100-Billion Ukraine War Chest ‘Madness’ (RT)
• British Knight Unhorsed (Helmer)

 

 

 

 

Show trial

 

 

Lysander Lynx

 

 

Musk Tulsi Rogan
https://twitter.com/i/status/1785758824634499292

 

 

 

 

“Cohen has pleaded guilty to tax evasion, to lying to Congress, and a judge has said that it is likely that Cohen also committed perjury. Yet, Cohen is Bragg’s witness against Trump.”

• Justice in a Shithole Country (Paul Craig Roberts)

Russiagate, documentsgate, insurrectiongate, pornstargate and the phony civil and criminal trials being orchestrated against President Trump demonstrate that Democrat attorney generals, prosecutors, and judges have no integrity, no respect for law, and regard law as a weapon to be used against those who stand in the way of their agendas. Consider, for example, the 34-count indictment brought by black Trump-hater New York city district attorney Alvin Bragg solely on the basis of Bragg’s assertion that Trump falsified business records by reporting extortion payments to an aging pornstar, who apparently threatened to make accusations to disrupt Trump’s presidential campaign unless Trump paid her off, as a legal expense instead of a campaign contribution to his campaign. It is an absolute fact that business owners and business executives do not make decisions about how expenses are reported.

Such decisions are the responsibility of accountants and attorneys. All Trump did was to sign papers prepared by accountants and attorneys, but of course Bragg, a quota-hire, is too stupid to understand how business functions. Bragg claims, further demonstrating his stupidity and incompetence, that Trump interfered in the 2016 presidential election and got himself elected President by hiding his payment to the pornstar as a legal expense. Bragg’s contention is that otherwise the presstitutes would have used the unsubstantiated pornstar’s allegations to defeat Trump’s 2016 election as president. How did something this absurd get to be a court case. Clearly, this is NOT THE WAY A FIRST WORLD COUNTRY WITH A RULE OF LAW BEHAVES. It is the way a shithole country behaves. A shithole country is what Democrats have turned America into.

Bragg’s stupid case based on nothing but Bragg’s assertion of how an expense should be reported so that it can be used as a weapon against Trump–and Bragg is not an accountant–has as its only support Trump-hater Michael Cohen, who wrote a book that claims “Donald Trump is the mirror into the depth of the soul of government corruption. He is the standard bearer for corrupt dictator wannabes. He is the poster boy for fascism.” Cohen has pleaded guilty to tax evasion, to lying to Congress, and a judge has said that it is likely that Cohen also committed perjury. Yet, Cohen is Bragg’s witness against Trump.

Moreover, the fake charges against Trump are misdemeanor charges, NOT FELONIES. Yet Bragg is falsely presenting them as felonies, claiming that the alleged misreporting of the expense constituted “election fraud.” Bragg does not have to worry about not having a case. He knows that in NYC the jury will convict Trump even if the entirety of the evidence proves Trump innocent. All Bragg has to do is to bring an indictment. The jury will convict. Nowhere in America, not in the media, trials, medical science, or scholarship do facts any longer matter. All that matters are agendas upheld by official narratives. There you have it. This is justice in a shithole country. Be a proud American. “USA, USA, USA!”

Read more …

White House, Letitia and Engoron are discussing how to take it all away.

• Trump Scores $1.8 Billion Windfall After Significant Increase In Truth Social Stake (ZH)

Donald Trump has added roughly $1.8 billion more to his net worth after regulatory filings show that he increased his stake in Truth Social by a significant degree – bringing the former president’s ownership to nearly 65% in Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG). Trump secured an additional 36 million shares of TMTG, bringing his stake to 114.75 million shares, according to an April 30 filing with the SEC. According to the latest price of nearly $50 per share, Trump’s stake in TMTG is valued at around $5.7 billion. The additional $1.8 billion was secured through 36 million additional “earnout shares” granted if TMTG hit certain performance metrics over a certain period, according to an April 15 filing. That said, Trump can’t sell any shares due to a six-month lockup agreement. As the Epoch Times notes further, TMTG shares have been on a roller-coaster ride since the company listed on Nasdaq last month through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and was snapped up by Trump supporters and speculators.

Following the merger and initial public offering (IPO) at the end of March, market interest exploded in TMTG, which trades under the ticker symbol DJT. Its stock price soared above $79 per share on its first day of trading, sending the company’s market cap to over $7 billion. After the initial surge of interest, TMTG shares pulled back to around the $62 mark, where they traded until news broke on April 1 that, in 2023, the company suffered a $58 million loss. Word of the loss sent its stock price on a downward trajectory, to $22.84 by April 16, which marked a bottom. Since then, TMTG shares have rallied, with only one meaningful pullback between April 19–23, and are now trading at $49.90 per share, the highest since an April 3 close of $48.81. Much of the $58 million loss that sent the stock price falling on April 1 appears to be related to an interest expense of $39.4 million on its outstanding debt, according to the 8-K filing. In 2022, the company made a net profit of $50.5 million.

The former president said on April 4 that media fixation on the $58 million loss was misguided. He touted TMTG fundamentals—which he said include over $200 million cash and no debt—as “very solid.” TMTG CEO Devin Nunes echoed that in an April 1 statement: “Closing out the 2023 financials related to the merger, Truth Social today has no debt and over $200 million in the bank, opening numerous possibilities for expanding and enhancing our platform.” “We intend to take full advantage of these opportunities to make Truth Social the quintessential free-speech platform for the American people,” he added. TMTG’s meteoric rise and subsequent wobble sparked massive interest in shorting the stock—meaning betting money on its potential price decline.

Mr. Nunes recently asked Congress to investigate allegations that TMTG stock was being manipulated by traders betting on its downfall. In a recent letter to top House Republicans, Mr. Nunes urged lawmakers to open an investigation into “anomalous trading” and possible even “unlawful manipulation” of TMTG stock. Mr. Nunes expressed concern about “naked” selling of TMTG stock, which is the practice of traders selling shares of a company without borrowing them first, according to the letter. The tech CEO added that the company has become the “single most expensive stock to short in U.S. markets” as of early April, arguing that traders now “have a significant financial incentive to lend non-existent shares” of the stock.

Read more …

Self-incrimination.

• Anti-Trump Prosecutor Pleads 5th As House GOP Probes Links To Biden DOJ (ZH)

House GOP investigators are investigating several individuals related to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s case against former President Trump, including one top prosecutor who was previously a senior DOJ official during the Biden administration, and a 2023 video of another prosecutor pleading the 5th (privilege against self-incrimination) when asked if he broke any laws while investigating President Trump. When asked by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) if he knowingly broke any laws while investigating President Trump, ex-Bragg prosecutor Mark. F. Pomerantz invoked the right during a May 1, 2023 deposition. “In a closed-door deposition, I asked Mark Pomerantz very simple questions regarding whether he committed crimes or violated the civil rights of any people in the course of his investigation of President Trump and his tenure at the Manhattan DA’s office,” Gaetz told Newsweek in a Thursday email.

Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee is investigating another top prosecutor on Bragg’s team – Matthew Colangelo, who’s leading the “politicized” prosecution against the former President. wrote House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) in an April 30 letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, as part of the committee’s oversight of “politically motivated prosecutions.” “That a former senior Biden Justice Department official is now leading the prosecution of President Biden’s chief political rival only adds to the perception that the Biden Justice Department is politicized and weaponized,” wrote Jordan. As the Epoch Times notes further, Mr. Colangelo, who delivered the opening statement in President Trump’s so-called “hush money” trial in New York last week, joined Mr. Bragg’s office in December 2022.

For a period of time, Mr. Colangelo also worked as Chief Counsel for Federal Initiatives at the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led a separate case against President Trump that accused him of inflating asset values to get better loan terms and that ended in a $464 million judgment against the former president. During his time at the office of Ms. James, who has also been accused of political motivations in her prosecution of the former president, Mr. Colangelo was involved in the investigation into the Trump Organization. In his letter, Mr. Jordan is demanding that Mr. Garland provide various records related to Mr. Colangelo’s work in the Justice Department, as well as any communication between Mr. Bragg’s office and the DOJ related to President Trump or any of his businesses.

“Given the perception that the Justice Department is assisting in Bragg’s politicized prosecution, we write to request information and documents related to Mr. Colangelo’s employment,” Mr. Jordan wrote, while alleging that Mr. Colangelo’s recent employment history “demonstrates his obsession with investigating a person rather than prosecuting a crime.” In the so-called “hush money” case, Mr. Bragg has charged President Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide nondisclosure payments that Mr. Colangelo alleges amounted to a criminal conspiracy to influence the 2016 presidential election. President Trump has maintained his innocence and has called the case a “political witch hunt.”

Read more …

“Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs points out the incongruity of a university, whose existence is based on freedom of speech, repressing freedom of speech.”

• The US Constitution Is Another Victim of Genocide (Paul Craig Roberts)

A 19th century plantation slave suffered less abuse than an American today and was less likely to have his head cracked open by a police baton than a Columbia University Student. [..] Republican US senators are no better friends of the US Constitution than the administrators at Columbia University, Netanyahu and the Israel Lobby, the NYPD, and the whore media. For example, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R, TN) labeled as “terrorists” students who protest against Israel’s destruction of Palestine. In order to protect Israel from students protesting genocide, Blackburn wants the students added to the terrorist watch list and prohibited from flying: “Any student who has promoted terrorism or engaged in terrorists[sic] acts on behalf of Hamas should be immediately be [sic] added to the terrorist watch list and placed on the [Transportation Security Administration] No Fly List,” Blackburn wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday.

Senator Rick Scott (R, FL) accuses protesting students of violating Israel’s right to commit genocide and wants the US Justice (sic) Department to investigate the students for “conspiring to violate the civil rights of a religious minority.” US senators are falling all over themselves pimping for Netanyahu’s final solution to the “Palestinian Problem.” One can see American conservatives supporting these demands, not realizing that their own Constitutional rights are in the crosshairs. Today in America there is no thought. There is only manipulated emotion and the sale of Americans’ honor for campaign contributions. So what does voting fix? The 21st century began with the George W. Bush’s suspension of habeas corpus on suspicion alone, and American liberty has gone downhill continuously at increasing speed. Only a simulacrum of the country into which I was born remains.

Americans are not permitted to speak freely about Israel. Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs points out the incongruity of a university, whose existence is based on freedom of speech, repressing freedom of speech. Closing down voices is today the primary function of the Israel Lobby, media, universities and “education” in general. It applies to faculty as well as to students. The Israel Lobby was able to reach into a Catholic university and cancel the tenure awarded to Norman Finkelstein and into the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and cancel the tenured appointment of a recruit from the University of Virginia. One wonders If the Israel Lobby will order Columbia to fire Professor Sachs.

Read more …

They should have guessed what he would do.

• US Republicans Want To Oust House Speaker (RT)

A number of Republicans in the US House of Representatives are reportedly looking to oust Speaker Mike Johnson. They accuse him of betraying his party by striking deals with the Democrats to pass major bills, including President Joe Biden’s $95 billion foreign military spending legislation that included aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene announced on Wednesday that she would force a vote to vacate the Majority speaker’s position, arguing that “Mike Johnson is not capable of that job. He has proven it over and over again.” “I think every member of Congress needs to take that vote and let the chips fall where they may and so next week, I am going to be calling this motion to vacate,” she said. Taylor Greene had previously threatened to take action against Johnson when GOP lawmakers demanded the White House address the southern border crisis as a condition for their backing of Biden’s foreign aid bill.

Greene’s proposal has not gained the required majority support among fellow House Republicans, however. There were only two other Republicans, Reps Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Paul A Gosar of Arizona, who publicly backed her motion. Some lawmakers oppose it in the belief that “it’s not the time,” given the upcoming presidential election. Democrats, meanwhile, have also dismissed Greene’s attempt to oust the Republican speaker and have vowed to band together to protect Johnson by voting to kill the motion to vacate his position. “House Democrats have aggressively pushed back against MAGA extremism. We will continue to do just that. At this moment, upon completion of our national security work, the time has come to turn the page on this chapter of Pro-Putin Republican obstruction,” reads a statement issued by the legislators.

“We will vote to table Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Motion to Vacate the Chair. If she invokes the motion, it will not succeed,” they said. J ohnson himself has also spoken out against attempts to have him removed, stating that “this motion is wrong for the Republican Conference, wrong for the institution, and wrong for the country.” Greene, however, has pointed to Johnson’s Democratic support as yet another reason for him to be removed. “Now we have […] the Democrats coming out, embracing Mike Johnson with a warm hug and a big, wet, sloppy kiss. And they are ready — they have endorsed him, they are ready to support him as speaker,” Greene stated, adding that “they want to keep it going, keep the band together. Why? Because Mike Johnson is giving them everything they want.” The congresswoman has not yet announced when exactly she will call the vote and whether she would force repeat votes on the issue if it fails next week.

Read more …

“Today, the two-state option is frantically being resuscitated in Washington, of all places, and by stalwart allies of Tel Aviv..”

• To Israel’s Horror, Hamas Brings ‘Two-state Solution’ Back Into Focus (Cradle)

After seven months of a brutal military assault on Gaza, it is abundantly clear that Israel has not succeeded in eradicating Hamas. Instead of delivering a decisive military victory, the occupation state finds itself being drawn kicking and screaming into negotiations over a two-state solution. Withstanding the impracticality of establishing a genuinely independent, sovereign Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, this scenario is becoming increasingly likely despite long-standing opposition from the Israeli government. It is an extraordinary development, particularly as Tel Aviv’s strategy, as articulated by foreign policy advisor Ophir Falk, was mainly to “destroy Hamas” and its military and governance capabilities entirely. Today, the two-state option is frantically being resuscitated in Washington, of all places, and by stalwart allies of Tel Aviv.

Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel and staunch supporter of the occupation state, argues in Foreign Affairs magazine that far from being “dead,” the two-state solution now looks to be the only reasonable game in town: “The reason for this revival is not complicated. There are, after all, only a few possible alternatives to the two-state solution. There is Hamas’ solution, which is the destruction of Israel. There is the Israeli ultra-right’s solution, which is the Israeli annexation of the West Bank, the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the deportation of Palestinians to other countries. There is the ‘conflict management’ approach pursued for the last decade or so by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which aimed to maintain the status quo indefinitely – and the world has seen how that worked out. And there is the idea of a binational state in which Jews would become a minority, thus ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. None of those alternatives would resolve the conflict – at least not without causing even greater calamities. And so if the conflict is to be resolved peacefully, the two-state solution is the only idea left standing.”

In widely publicized comments last week, Khalil al-Hayya, deputy head of Hamas in Gaza, has appeared to endorse the 1967 borders for a future Palestinian state explicitly. In a recent interview with AP, Hayya spoke of “a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the return of Palestinian refugees in accordance with the international resolutions” along Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Most significantly, though, he hinted that the resistance movement’s military wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, could potentially dissolve itself and/or fold its cadres into a Palestinian national army: “All the experiences of people who fought against occupiers, when they became independent and obtained their rights and their state, what have these forces done? They have turned into political parties and their defending fighting forces have turned into the national army.”

Instead of embracing these possibilities, Falk dismissed Hayya as a “high-ranking terrorist” and sought to redirect the conversation back to intransigent Israeli demands: “Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government set a mission to destroy Hamas’ military and governing capabilities in Gaza, free the hostages, and ensure that Gaza does not pose a threat to Israel and the rest of the civilized world in the future,” he said, adding, “Those goals will be achieved.”

Read more …

“We watched Medea Benjamin of Code Pink get thrown out of the dinner for holding up a placard reading, “100 journalists killed in Gaza.”

• Of Journalists, Students and Power (Patrick Lawrence)

The American media are never short of red-letter days when it comes to its wonderful combination of superciliousness and irresponsibility. But last week the mainstream dailies and magazines went all the way to scarlet and alizarin crimson. The brighter the better, I say, when the derelictions of our media are on display such that readers can no longer miss the deceptions and distractions that are at this point their intent. I was reading along over breakfast last Thursday in search of the overnight news on the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza when I came upon the headline in The New York Times, “Laundry Detergent Sheets Are Poor Cleaners.” Wow. This is a story The Times had been following since its April 5 opener, “The 5 Best Laundry Detergents of 2024,” but my friends on Eighth Avenue left me hanging. At last I could go forth into the day confident I was a well-informed American, altogether engagé.

Last Thursday, last Thursday: Wasn’t that the day the U.N. Relief and Works Agency reported that Israel’s military operations “continue from air, land and sea” and that “in northern Gaza only five hospitals remain operational, and in the south only six”? Yes, I read this on a U.N. website, but The Times didn’t have room for it. Then I was even better informed last Sunday, when The New Yorker published a long, delightfully inane conversation between David Remnick, who has very excellently overseen the ruination of what was once a good magazine, and Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian who always has a lot of important things to say. The occasion was … I shall let Remnick explain:

And now, for the first time, he has directed a movie. It is about a Russian Orthodox monk in the sixteenth century who starves himself to death rather than give in to the depredations of tsarist society. No, it isn’t. It’s about the race in the early sixties between Kellogg and Post to invent the Pop-Tart. Yes, really. It is called “Unfrosted” and will air on Netflix on May 3rd. It is extremely silly, in a good way. Extremely silly in a good way. I think I understand. Elsewhere in the news, as they say in the broadcast trade, the Israel Occupation Forces continued bombing Rafah as the Remnick item came out last Sunday—Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where the IOF had ordered Gazans to flee for their safety as they, the Israelis, bombed and bulldozed northern Gaza to the point of uninhabitability. But let us not allow brutalities of Medieval-style gore, savagery for which we pay, to disturb our psyches. With what shall our media fill our minds?

The dropping of American ordnance on Palestinian children or the history of Pop–Tarts, humorously told? We knew the answer by the time The New Yorker published the adolescent, time-wasting badinage Remnick and Seinfeld shared because we had watched—the caker over this past week—the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last Saturday evening. We watched a stream of reporters eager for some passing social connection to celebrity and power stride disdainfully by people demonstrating against the Israeli–U.S. genocide. We watched Medea Benjamin of Code Pink get thrown out of the dinner for holding up a placard reading, “100 journalists killed in Gaza.”

And we heard Colin Jost conclude his 23 minutes of sometimes-pithy humor with his ode to what was most conspicuously missing in that roomful of feckless poseurs. “Decency is why we’re all here tonight,” the television comedian said with unfeigned seriousness. “Decency is how we’re able to be here tonight.” By then Jost, at bottom a court jester, had already told his audience of narcissists, “Your words speak truth to power. Your words bring light to the darkness.” Yes, believe it, in the spring of 2024 people still say these sorts of things about corporate journalists. And the people so addressed take them to be true. Words. Words. Language, its use and misuse.

Read more …

They were there?!

• Jews Did Not Kill Jesus – US House of Representatives (RT)

The US House of Representatives has passed a bill aimed at combating anti-Semitism in American universities amid continuing student protests against Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The Antisemitism Awareness Act was approved by 320 votes to 91 on Wednesday, with 21 Republicans and 70 Democrats being among those opposing the legislation. The bill would require the US Department of Education to adopt a broad definition of anti-Semitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which describes the phenomenon as “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” It also contains a list of “contemporary examples of anti-Semitism,” which have been shared online by social media users, including Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has said.

Among the examples of hatred toward Jews mentioned in the document is “using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g. claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.” Marjorie Taylor Greene was among the lawmakers who voted against the bill. “Antisemitism is wrong,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday, but added that she would not support legislation that “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” Other anti-Semitic actions mentioned in the bill include “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel… than to the interests of their own nations,” making allegations “about a world Jewish conspiracy and or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government,” as well as “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

Since mid-April, students have set up protest camps at more than 40 colleges across the US, demanding a stop to the violence in Gaza and an end to Washington’s support of Israel. The demonstrations were initially peaceful, but clashes have erupted at Columbia University in New York, UCLA, and other colleges as police moved in to disperse the gatherings. Hundreds have been arrested amid the unrest. Israel is facing increasing international criticism over the rising death toll among Palestinians following its latest invasion of Gaza. According to the enclave’s health ministry, more than 34,000 people have been killed in the ongoing airstrikes and ground offensive. The campaign was launched in response to the October 7 cross-border attack on Israel by Hamas, in which at least 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.

Read more …

Boeing is just like the Clinton family.

• Second Boeing Whistleblower Dies Suddenly (RT)

Joshua Dean, a former Spirit AeroSystems employee who raised the alarm over lax standards in the production of Boeing’s 737 MAX jet, has died following a sudden and severe illness. In March, another Boeing whistleblower was found dead in a hotel parking lot in what authorities tentatively described as a suicide. The 737 MAX airliner has had a history of accidents, including two leading to multiple deaths. In October 2018, one of the aircraft went down in Indonesia, claiming the lives of all 189 people on board. Five months later, another Boeing 737 MAX – operated by Ethiopian Airlines – crashed soon after takeoff, killing all 157 passengers and crew. The two tragedies prompted a 20-month grounding of the airliner.

In January, a Boeing 737 MAX-9 operated by Alaska Airlines saw one of its doors and part of the fuselage break away in midair, soon after takeoff. An audit by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of Boeing and one of its key suppliers, Spirit AeroSystems, subsequently “identified non-compliance issues in Boeing’s manufacturing process control, parts handling and storage, and product control.” Dean’s family members revealed that the former quality auditor at Spirit AeroSystems passed away on Tuesday morning. His relatives said he had been hospitalized just over two weeks ago with impaired breathing. Dean was intubated, developed pneumonia, and contracted a fast-spreading antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus infection. The 45-year-old, who is said to have been in good health and leading a healthy lifestyle, was put on a life-support machine.

In October 2022, Dean said he had uncovered a serious manufacturing defect in the production of a key component that helps Boeing’s 737 MAX maintain normal pressure. He claimed that management chose to ignore his warnings, after which he filed a complaint with the FAA, alleging “serious and gross misconduct by senior quality management of the 737 production line.”Spirit AeroSystems fired Dean in April 2023, accusing him of missing another major flaw. The whistleblower then filed a complaint with the Department of Labor, claiming his termination was in retaliation for his revelations. In March, former Boeing quality manager John Barnett, known for raising concerns about the firm’s production standards, was found dead with a gunshot wound days before he was due to give evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit against the aerospace giant.

Read more …

10-year plan in the US, 5-year plan in Europe. Forever war.

• Hungary Rejects €100-Billion Ukraine War Chest ‘Madness’ (RT)

Budapest is opposing a potential €100-billion ($107 billion), five-year NATO plan to fund Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said. The draft plan on the military aid fund was presented to member states of the US-led bloc by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg earlier this week, Szijjarto revealed. The minister made the remarks on Thursday to Hungarian broadcaster M1 before heading for a ministerial meeting of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in Paris.“On Tuesday, the NATO member states received the secretary-general’s proposal to raise 100 billion that NATO plans to spend on the war,” the diplomat said, adding that since the money is to be collected over five years, this means NATO “expects the hostilities to continue for this period.”

Budapest will oppose the initiative and is not planning to participate in arming Kiev or training its soldiers, Szijjarto stressed. The draft plan was presented to the bloc’s member states in its “first reading” and is still a subject to negotiations, the senior diplomat noted. In the coming weeks during negotiations we will fight for Hungary’s right to stay away from this madness, from collecting these 100 billion and siphoning them out of Europe. Budapest prioritizes the security of its own people before anything else and will do its best to “stay out of war,” Szijjarto explained, adding Hungary’s opinion remains that the conflict can only be resolved through negotiations. Nonetheless, Budapest acknowledges mounting global security issues and wants to be ready to face them, he said.

“We cannot ignore the threat of a new world war and the preparations for a nuclear war. This madness here in Europe must be stopped,” Szijjarto urged. Hungary has consistently expressed its opposition to the ever-growing involvement of the US-led NATO bloc – and of the EU – in the Ukrainian conflict, refusing to send arms to prop up Kiev or to train its troops, and forbidding use of its territory to funnel such shipments from third countries. Budapest has also publicly spoken out against the potential accession of Ukraine into NATO, which has long been one of the key goals of Ukrainian leadership.

Read more …

Helmer shouting match. For more see johnhelmer.net.

• British Knight Unhorsed (Helmer)

The kings of Europe used to pay clever men to pretend to be fools in order to make jokes to amuse the monarch and his court. They were called jesters. A man who pretends to be cleverer than he is, and who tells jokes in order to fool others into making himself rich – they are hucksters. In the Jewish garment trade their merchandise is known as schmattes. This means “rags”; it was a Polish word before it was picked up in Yiddish — something cheap to make to be sold dear. By extension, peddling anything cheap and fast on false pretences is schmatte business. The Gentile word for this is a hustle. For the merchandise Sir Lawrence Freedman of London has been selling, he has been well paid personally, and the corporation he used to run when he was a professor of “war studies” at King’s College is now a multimillion-pound business. To collect money for himself, and also for his son, Freedman has used company identities whose financial reports can be read at the UK Companies House registry.

The operation optimizes on its tax liabilities to the UK Inland Revenue by following the advice of Judith Freedman, a professor of taxation at Oxford; she is Freedman’s wife. The turnover, costs, tax, and profit lines of the Freedman businesses give a glimpse into how it possible for him to appear regularly in books, newspapers, and corporate conventions in order to announce, as he advertised last week in a London newspaper, that the new US military supplies for the Ukraine will give the allies time to “restore [Kiev’s] battlefield fortunes”; solve the Ukrainian “manpower problems…as new recruits don’t face the prospects of being sent to fight with insufficient ammunition”; “time before they will have the strength to start liberating substantial amounts of territory”; and time to compel President Vladimir Putin to “contemplate the possibility that [the war] might yet again swing towards Ukraine”. The subjunctive “might” on the punchline is Freedman’s slip – he reveals he isn’t sure of the value of what he is selling.

Freedman was the British government’s official historian of the Falklands War and then a member of the Chilcot committee of inquiry on the British war against Iraq. He has also been a career-long Russia threat faker and fighter of the war his side keeps losing, as he keeps insisting on the reverse. This isn’t jestering, it’s huckstering. Freedman is for hire through an organ called All American Entertainment (AAE), which describes itself as “a full-service talent booking agency, specifically focused on the needs of event professionals looking to book keynote speakers and corporate entertainment for their events.” His pro-US credentials for fighting the war against Russia, and his pro-Israel credentials for fighting the war against the Arabs and Iran have earned him an engagement at a Zionist-financed think-tank in Australia which calls Freedman “the foremost authority on modern war in the English-speaking world.” Small world, if viewed from Sydney, Tel Aviv, or London.

Starting with a PhD entitled “The definition of the Soviet threat in strategic arms decisions of the United States: 1961–1974” – that’s the US targeting version of Russia — Freedman has monetized his war-fighting line through incorporation of a company called King’s College Business Limited, UK company number 02714181. Founded in 1992 with the name KCL Enterprises Ltd, it said it was an investment and commercial trading company without an express purpose, apart from making money. Freedman became a director in 1998 when he gave a home address in Wimbledon. On Freedman’s street, local realtors value the average house price at the moment to be £1.9 million; this is down 15% from its peak in 2017. War with Russia has been much more profitable for Freedman. Losing the war, that’s to say.

In 2007 Freedman was chairman of the board of directors of KCL Enterprises when it was decided to make the King’s College brand name more visible. According to the audited financial report for that year, the purpose of the company was “to assist King’s College London to market its research and consultancy capabilities.” The report reveals that turnover in 2007 was £2.3 million; it then grew by 55% in 2008 to £3.5 million. “Administrative expenses” came to almost the same total, meaning the company was operating for tax and expense optimization through which directors and King’s College academics like Freedman were running their consultancy and other fees. When Freedman retired from King’s College at the end of 2008, he also left the company board. It has gone on to quadruple its turnover in 2023 to £12.6 million. War against Russia is very good for business.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Shar Pei

 

 

Blue whale
https://twitter.com/i/status/1786025591071732163

 

 

Russian bear

 

 

What lies beneath

 

 

 

 

Big bath
https://twitter.com/i/status/1786131306633424999

 

 

Puppies
https://twitter.com/i/status/1785783023029432757

 

 

Doorbell

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle March 23 2024

Mar 232024
 
 March 23, 2024  Posted by at 9:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  37 Responses »


Edvard Munch Spring in Johan Karl Street 1891

 

• Trump: “I Almost Have Five Hundred Million Dollars In Cash” (ZH)
• Trump’s Third Act Has Begun. It’s a Beauty. (Scott Adams)
• Wake-up Call (James Howard Kunstler)
• No Ukraine Talks Because US Threatens Zelensky – Seymour Hersh (Sp.)
• Let NATO Troops Enter Ukraine. The War Will End Much Faster Then – Orban (VV)
• Russia is at War – Kremlin (RT)
• Macron Believes Ukraine Could Fall Soon – Politico (RT)
• La Macronnerie of a Failed French President: Ukraine (Jay)
• France’s Megalomaniac Macron is Gambling With World Peace (SCF)
• EU Eyes ‘Groundbreaking’ Change On Ukraine Arms Funding (RT)
• Ukraine Makes Fresh Move To Draft More Soldiers (RT)
• Washington In Denial Over Putin’s Victory While Gaming Its Own Elections (Cox)
• World Sees Gaza as ‘US Genocide’ Not Just Israel’s (Sp.)
• CIA Told DOJ to Stay Away from Kevin Morris in Hunter Biden Probe (Turley)
• CIA Protecting Biden by Blocking IRS Interviews – Whistleblower (DeMartino)
• Global Population Set To Fall For First Time In 700 Years (MN)

 

 


BREAKING: Shareholders have just voted to let Trump’s company, Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, become a public company, which could earn Trump $4 billion. NOTE: However, if Trump wants to use this money to help with his legal issues in a fraud case by Letitia James, he has to get special permission to sell his shares early. NOTE: Trump’s company will start being traded on the stock market under the symbol “DJT” as soon as next week.

 

 

Letitia

 

 

Vivek

 

 

Lawfare
https://twitter.com/i/status/1770861500103557197

 

 

Cannon

 

 

There’s plenty of money for enhanced border security in the $1.2 Trillion funding package. Just not the US border.

 

 

Stephen Miller

 

 

Watters

 

 

Watters Fani

 

 

Immigration

 

 

Will The Supreme Court Recognize Voter Fraud And Ensure It Doesn’t Happen in 2024?

 

 

 

 

“Letitia James is about to hand Trump a huge victory…… when she seizes Trump Tower, the case is now federal bc Trumps Atty’s are ready to go into Federal Court, claiming his 8th Amendment rights have been violated. Thus putting an immediate freeze on her. Many are wondering why a federal judge hasn’t stepped in…. well the reason is…. she hasn’t acted on her threats yet…. so Trump’s Constitutional rights have yet to be violated.”

• Trump: “I Almost Have Five Hundred Million Dollars In Cash” (ZH)

Former President Trump on Friday said on Truth Social that “through hard work, talent, and luck, I currently have almost five hundred million dollars in cash.” The announcement comes as a Monday deadline fast approaches for him to come up with roughly $454 million to stay judgement in his civil fraud case while he appeals. According to Trump, he had intended to use a “substantial amount” of his money in his presidential campaign. “THE OFTEN OVERTURNED POLITICAL HACK JUDGE ON THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT A.G. CASE, WHERE I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG, KNEW THIS, WANTED TO TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME,” President Trump wrote. “THAT’S WHERE AND WHY HE CAME UP WITH THE SHOCKING NUMBER WHICH, COUPLED WITH HIS CRAZY INTEREST DEMAND, IS APPROXIMATELY $454,000,000,” he continued.

As the Epoch Times notes further: “The judgment total was $363 million, but breaks down with about $355 million of that specifically applying to President Trump, $4 million to be recovered from Eric Trump, $4 million to be recovered from Donald Trump Jr., and $1 million to be recovered from former Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg. With the applied 9 percent interest, court filings say the bond comes out to more than $464 million, with a little more than $10 million of that attributed to judgment on Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Mr. Weisselberg. Judgment was entered on Feb. 23, kicking off a 30-day clock to post the massive sum, set to expire on March 25. President Trump, in the post, decried the ruling as an example of “communism in America.” Meanwhile, even the AP found that in 70 years of similar cases involving civil fraud, Trump’s stood out as unique.

President Trump is billions of dollars richer after shareholders in Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC) on Friday approved a merger with Trump’s media startup, Truth Social. The long-delayed merger adds roughly $3.5 billion to Trump’s net worth – however the former president won’t be able to sell any shares for at least six months unless the board waives it (or they can back a loan), raising questions over whether he’ll be able to leverage it to secure a $464 million bond in his New York civil fraud case – which his lawyers say is “impossible” to secure due to a lack of cash on hand. If Trump can’t secure the giant sum by Monday, he risks the seizure of assets – which New York has already begun positioning itself to do. Earlier this week, DWAC sued to force its former CEO, Patrick Orlando, to vote his 14.77% shareholding in favor of the merger, despite an ongoing dispute over compensation, Axios and FT report. Orlando was on the shareholder vote call.

“The professional relationship between Mr Orlando and Digital World became strained and has continued to deteriorate such that there is no assurance that Mr Orlando as a current member of our board or as a controlling affiliate of the sponsor will be co-operative,” DWAC warned in a filing last month. Following the merger, DWAC will effectively cease to exist, and will be replaced by TMTG – which will be listed on the Nasdaq. Its board of directors will include Donald Trump Jr. as well as several former members of the Trump White House, the report continues. Former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) will serve as TMTG’s CEO. Meanwhile, and perhaps in anticipation of Trump selling to satisfy the bond, DWAC shares have plummeted on the news to the tune of 8% in early trading.

Beyond Trump’s massive payout from the deal, three hedge funds also stand to make huge profits – Anson Funds, Mangrove Capital Partners and All Blue Capital, which participated in a $50mm convertible debt offering earlier this year after other funds had walked away. They’re sitting on over $400 million in gains as of Thursday’s closing price. “The return will be amazing,” said one person involved in the financing, per FT. “Trump’s advisers have been keeping him on the sidelines . . . they want to get this vote clear with no issues with the government. Then, on Tuesday when it starts trading, it is game on for Trump.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1770991128948420912

Read more …

X thread. “Trump turned Leticia James into his best fundraiser..”

• Trump’s Third Act Has Begun. It’s a Beauty. (Scott Adams)

Next week, Trump could make over $4 billion when his media company goes public, removing all doubt about his billionaire status. And you can stop asking if he would have been better off putting his inheritance in a savings account in the 70s. I expect Trump to leave a 15% tip for Leticia James and the Democrats because they made his windfall possible by hunting him and censoring him for years. You can call it a bond, not a tip, if you prefer. When the Supreme Court tosses out the unconstitutional fine, Trump gets most of his “tip” back. The Democrats planned to cripple Trump financially so he couldn’t spend as much on the campaign. Trump turned Leticia James into his best fundraiser. Lots of interesting developments lately on the topic of the 2020 election. The Simulation wants at least one of those fresh allegations to be a Kraken.

Trump’s legal maneuvering is likely to keep him eligible for the election. You can fantasize about a heroic Democrat such as Newsom swooping in and replacing Biden, but it’s looking less likely every day. If it had always been the plan, it would have happened by now. Looks like Biden has to stay on the job to keep the Biden Crime Family out of jail. The predictable Democrat Summer Hoax will add some excitement, but it will be forgotten and debunked by November. Trump’s upcoming victory is looking like it will be, as Trump says, “too big to rig.” And by that I mean Democrats will try to rig it anyway and get caught. That will be fun.

The gears of the machine have become visible. We can all see the FBI is rotten and the DOJ is weaponized. We know the border is open intentionally. We know the cartels are working with our government. We know our elections are DESIGNED to not be auditable and there’s only one reason for it. We can see Biden is not in charge. We know the Ukraine war was always about its energy resources and who gets to own them. We know our rising debt is ruinous. We know our experts are liars. We know our pharma and food industries are poisoning us. We know our government is racist. We know the corporate media is essentially owned by Democrats who are controlled by intelligence entities and they are actively brainwashing the population. We know the 1st and 2nd amendments, and X, are under sustained government attack because they are the public’s last defense against the government. But we are not quitters. And the odds do not apply to us.

Trump Ad

Read more …

“But fiends got to fiend, and if you try to deprive them of being fiends then you are guilty of “hate.“

• Wake-up Call (James Howard Kunstler)

Can you feel it? The tension rising to the red-line? It runs clear through all of Western Civ. We are ruled by governments of fiends. But now, the sun rides higher in the sky. The sap is rising in the northern forests. The earth heaves. The buds swell and blush. Something is in the air. The animals are waking from their long winter sleep. The natives are restless. The two traditional political divisions, liberal and conservative died with Covid. Now there are simply the sane versus the insane. The sane have had enough of being pushed around by the insane. The insane don’t register much of what reality tries to tell them. They have a body of insane ideas to comfort and protect them from the reality’s rigors. To call that body of ideas an “ideology” is way too polite. That the insane call themselves “progressive,” is a signature of their insanity. Progress toward what better state of things? Toward a supremacy of fiends, sadists, degenerates, and morons seizing riches and power by every dishonest means possible outside the rule of law and common decency?

It’s not even suitable to call them “communists.” They lack the necessary idealism for that. They don’t expect to put their shoulders to the wheel with their fellow man. They just want to grab your stuff and then kill you so they don’t have to hear any complaints. The insane do not believe any of the theoretical bullshit they want to force you to swallow. They don’t care about climate change. It’s just a cudgel they use to beat everyone over the head so they can steal your stuff. They don’t care about “democracy.” It’s just a line of bullshit to cover up their election-stealing. Do you suppose that sane people would keep using electronic vote-tabulating machines that were demonstrably connected to the Internet, and thus hackable, if they cared about election integrity? Of course not. They would arrange p.d.q. to junk them and use paper ballots, and only in person at polling places, with “absentee” exceptions only for people out of the country.

The insane do not care about public health. Everything that is known about the Covid-19 vaccinations tells you that they are unsafe and don’t prevent infection or transmission of a flu-like illness that might not even be what it was officially labeled as. Our public health officials in the FDA, the CDC, and in other corners of the Department of health and Human Services, lie about everything they’re responsible for. This week, the CDC (under Director Mandy Cohen) released a 148-page study on myocarditis reactions to mRNA shots. Every word on every page of the document was redacted. The CDC printed countless copies of the report with 148 utterly blank pages, and then proffered them to the news media. How is that not insane? The insane do not care about the rule of law. The conduct of “Lawfare” is the subversion of the law by dishonest means. It is a species of racketeering. And that is why Lawfare rogues such Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, Matthew Graves, and Merrick Garland, should be charged under the federal RICO statutes for conspiring to deprive sane citizens of their rights and property in the many cases related to the 1/6/21 riot at the US Capitol.

It is, so far, an abiding mystery of contemporary history as to how New York Attorney General Letitia James managed to get away with prosecuting a real estate case against Donald Trump that was no more than victimless business-as-usual between a borrower and his lenders. Ms. James ran for that elected office promising to “get” Mr. Trump on something, anything. That is not how the rule of law works. Under the rule of law, first you determine that there is a crime and then look for who did the crime. Letitia James must be insane and/or pretty stupid. The short-term gain of stealing Mr. Trump’s property under a false color-of-law and creating impediments to his election campaign, will, sooner or later, blow back at her as a matter of malicious prosecution and, plausibly, racketeering as well. (With whom did she conspire to bring this case? We shall find out.) She will eventually be disgraced publicly as her teammate Fani Willis has already been disgraced in Fulton County, Georgia.

I’ll tell you something that all sane people now know but won’t talk about for fear of being crushed by the levers of Lawfare: this looks like a concerted effort by people-of-color to railroad people of non-color. If you think that is a good thing for race relations in our country, then you are insane. Here are a bunch of other things that are insane: Re-litigating the first amendment is insane. It means what it says, and states it plainly. The open border is insane. No credible sovereign polity would allow it. It would be opposed with force, if necessary. Turning children into transsexuals on a wholesale basis is insane, and fiendishly so. Everybody knows that it is not good for the children or for our society as a whole. But fiends got to fiend, and if you try to deprive them of being fiends then you are guilty of “hate.”

Read more …

‘No negotiations or settlement or we won’t support your government with the $45 billion in non-military funds [that Ukraine is now receiving annually..'”

• No Ukraine Talks Because US Threatens Zelensky – Seymour Hersh (Sp.)

Negotiations on resolving the conflict in Ukraine could have started months ago, but US authorities threatened Vladimir Zelensky with withdrawal of non-military funding, US journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh said in an article on Substack. “We were on the verge of a reasonable negotiation several months ago before Putin’s re-election and Zelensky’s military degradation. The US leaders got wind of the possibility and gave Zelensky the ultimatum-‘No negotiations or settlement or we won’t support your government with the $45 billion in non-military funds [that Ukraine is now receiving annually,'” the source told the journalist. According to Hersh’s information, US intelligence community recognises that “Ukraine has little chance of winning…”

Hersh’s interlocutor also added that US President Joe Biden has staked on confronting the “Russian threat to NATO” and will not change his course under any circumstances, while the end is inevitable. “There is no road to victory for Ukraine, and it will end with Putin as an historical icon in Russia…,” the source concluded. In autumn 2022, Zelensky signed a decree according to which his country will not negotiate with Russia as long as it is led by Vladimir Putin. Russia, for its part, has repeatedly noted its readiness to discuss the settlement of the conflict through diplomatic means. As Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasised, the Russia does not see any prerequisites for a peaceful transition of the situation, and sovereignty over the new Russian regions and Crimea is not up for discussion.

Read more …

X thread. “And the West will get a lesson for memory that it is bad to fight with Russia..”

• Let NATO Troops Enter Ukraine. The War Will End Much Faster Then – Orban (VV)

Viktor Orban: “It’s a strange feeling when you come from Hungary to Brussels. Hungary looks like a completely normal country. We have a calm and rational mindset, and if you come to Brussels and talk to politicians, you will be surprised. There is a military mood, military language, military logic. The leaders talk as if they are waging their own war against Russia. And now they are saying that soldiers should be stationed in Ukraine. It is not clear exactly what they mean, where they should be stationed, with what weapons and for what purposes. But they have already begun to prepare for the fact that in this situation it will be quite natural if Western European countries deploy military posts on the territory of Ukraine, which shocks Hungarians.

Therefore, I felt as if I had entered another galaxy, and we must be careful not to fall into the psychosis of these twenty or so state leaders. [How far are Western leaders willing to go in terms of supporting Ukraine? The most disturbing thing about this whole story is that two or three months ago it was unthinkable, now, two or three months later, it becomes an ordinary event.” That’s what I said – the worse, the better. Ukraine attacked the Belgorod region. Where is Ukraine’s energy sector now? Russia has always needed a good kick in the ass for it to act. So, let NATO troops enter Ukraine. The war will end much faster then. And the West will get a lesson for memory that it is bad to fight with Russia.

Read more …

“..Peskov explained that despite the conflict “de facto turning into a war,” legally it remains classified in Russia as a special military operation..”

• Russia is at War – Kremlin (RT)

Russia’s military operation in Ukraine has turned into full-fledged war after the West became a participant in the conflict, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with national media published on Friday. Moscow will continue to pursue its goal of ensuring that the Ukrainian military cannot pose a threat to Russian citizens or territory, the spokesman told the Argumenti i Fakty newspaper, noting that the country now has four new federal subjects which must be protected and fully liberated from Kiev’s forces. Peskov stressed that Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that publicly claims it will seize the Crimean Peninsula as well as Russia’s new territories, referring to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.

“We are at war,” Peskov stated, explaining that while the conflict began as a special military operation, as soon as “the collective West became a participant in this on the side of Ukraine, for us it became a war.” In a phone conversation with journalists later in the day, Peskov explained that despite the conflict “de facto turning into a war,” legally it remains classified in Russia as a special military operation and that nothing has changed in that regard. The Russian Defense Ministry recently reported that since the start of the military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, over 13,000 foreign nationals have taken part in the fighting on the side of Kiev’s forces.

Of these fighters, which Moscow describes as mercenaries, some 5,962 have been “eliminated,” according to the ministry. Most of them came from Poland, Georgia, the US, Canada, the UK, Romania, Germany, and France, it reported. The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, claimed earlier this week that France is preparing its forces for deployment to Ukraine and is allegedly looking to send as many as 2,000 troops to fight for Kiev. French President Emmanuel Macron has hinted in recent weeks at the possible deployment of NATO forces to Ukraine, stating he could not “exclude” this possibility while branding Russia an “adversary.” Moscow has warned that such a step would likely lead to a direct clash between Russian and NATO forces, which, according to President Vladimir Putin, would be “one step shy of a full-scale World War III.”

Katyusha

Read more …

“..Marine Le Pen [..] accused the president last week of “hijacking” the Ukraine issue for the sake of domestic electoral politics..”

• Macron Believes Ukraine Could Fall Soon – Politico (RT)

French President Emmanuel Macron believes Ukraine might be defeated on the battlefield in short order, the French edition of Politico reported on Wednesday. The outlet’s Playbook section spoke with several members of the president’s party who had attended a working dinner at the Elysee Palace the evening before. While most of the discussion centered on the upcoming European Parliament elections, the Ukraine conflict also came up. “Ukraine could fall very quickly,” one of the outlet’s sources quoted Macron as saying. Macron ramped up his rhetoric about Ukraine a few weeks after a number of French nationals fighting on behalf of Kiev were killed in a Russian missile strike. At a meeting of EU leaders in Paris in late February, he refused to rule out the possibility of a NATO intervention in Ukraine.

Though the idea was quickly rejected by almost all members of the US-led bloc and its secretary-general, Macron doubled down, declaring there would be “no limits” to French support for Kiev and calling Russia an “adversary.” Meanwhile, the French Army’s Chief of Staff Pierre Schill announced that the country’s military was “ready,” presumably for a war. Moscow has strongly condemned Macron’s remarks and cautioned NATO against taking further hostile moves. According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the deployment of Western soldiers to Ukraine would make direct conflict with Russia “inevitable.” Marine Le Pen, a prominent member of the opposition National Rally party and Macron’s rival in the 2022 election, accused the president last week of “hijacking” the Ukraine issue for the sake of domestic electoral politics. Polls have shown that the French support helping Kiev with weapons and money, but draw the line at getting involved directly with boots on the ground.

Concerns that Kiev might be losing the war appear to be based on several French military assessments leaked earlier this month to the outlet Marianne. One report, following Kiev’s summer offensive, concluded that Ukraine could not win the conflict by military means. Another described the Battle of Avdeevka as a Ukrainian rout and had the French military “in cold sweat,” according to Marianne. A few days later, the daily Le Monde claimed that Macron’s talk of possibly sending troops dated all the way back to June 2023, when the Ukrainian counteroffensive was just starting. General Schill also told the outlet that Macron’s public statements have been “foremost a political and strategic message” to Russia about France’s “will and commitment,” rather than an actual escalation.

Read more …

“Western elites have the technology and well-trained soldiers. What they lack is the stamina and political courage to face the baptism of outrage once body bags start arriving back on home soil..”

• La Macronnerie of a Failed French President: Ukraine (Jay)

Just what is Emmanuel Macron thinking with his recent media trysts which have gained the attention of the world? Initially, we thought his statements about sending French troops to Ukraine to fight Russian forces was merely chaf to throw up in the air to distract journalists and a gullible French public. It’s true, it has rattled Germany which promptly replied to Macron, reminding him that EU countries are not “at war with Russia” – a curious statement given that just a week earlier, a leaked audio conversation with German air force chiefs revealed that they wanted to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine so as to hit the Crimean bridge. Of course, now that we all know what the intentions of the Germans were, Scholz has been forced to backpedal and downplay the scandal, sticking to its position of neutrality. But if you think that’s funny, wait until you see what Macron has in store for Old Europe.

Could it be really true that he believes French troops could end up in Ukraine? A quick glance at the actual quote from Le Parisienne interview would suggest the opposite and that he’s hedging his bets, or, as some suspect trying to bait the Americans into wanting to get there first. Is this what the British expression “jumping the gun” really means? “Maybe at some point – I don’t want it, I won’t take the initiative – we will have to have operations on the ground, whatever they may be, to counter the Russian forces,” he is quoted as saying. In reality, it seems as though he has been misquoted as there is no story here. Even he is saying on the record that he won’t authorise it. So is he hinting at other western countries taking the lead, perhaps the Poles, Lithuanians and Latvians? Possibly. But in reality, the most likely scenario would be the U.S. biting the bullet and financing a private army made up of various nationalities.

Yet even this initiative would need to be prepared for media and even Russia itself so that the underlying point is clear: this is not a NATO war. Of course, this thinking is fatally flawed as it is based on a premise that Putin wouldn’t dare retaliate against those units of troops who he knows are located in a particular spot, as this could invoke Article V of the NATO treaty itself. Yet any two-bit geopolitical hack who knows Putin, knows this would not stop him as killing western troops – or even better capturing a small number – would mean the end of the West’s intervention. Western elites have the technology and well-trained soldiers. What they lack is the stamina and political courage to face the baptism of outrage once body bags start arriving back on home soil. It may well mean, for Macron, if he were ever to entertain the idea of French troops, that it would or could be African troops from former French colonies enrolled under private contracts as mercenaries.

But as I saw in Somalia in 1993, Western leaders like Clinton had no stomach whatsoever for even a small number of their own being killed or captured. Osama bin Laden watched how Clinton soiled his own pants when just 18 soldiers died in the spectacular U.S. Rangers failure in Mogadishu with an operation which was supposed to take an hour. Black Hawk Down and its implications inspired Bin Laden to bomb both the Dar Es Salam and Nairobi U.S. embassies after seeing how vulnerable the West is fighting terrorism, or merely sticking its nose into other countries problems. All it actually took was Newsweek to run a cover of a U.S. soldier’s body being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu to make Clinton not only pull out of Somalia altogether, but convince the UN itself to leave later in 1995. It also meant that the West would not help hundreds of thousands of victims of the civil war in Rwanda which led to the genocide in 1994. One U.S. soldier. One Newsweek cover.

Read more …

“..the French military contingency does not make sense from a military point of view, unless that is, the ulterior objective is to incite escalation..”

• France’s Megalomaniac Macron is Gambling With World Peace (SCF)

It is unequivocally clear that if France or any other NATO member deploys combat troops to Ukraine, those troops will be targeted and killed by Russian firepower. In that case, the proxy war in Ukraine becomes an all-out war between the U.S.-led NATO alliance and Russia. That is, World War Three will have started, which in all probability leads inexorably to a nuclear conflagration. Anyone pushing that trajectory is contemptible and criminal. Step up, Monsieur Macron. This narcissistic wannabe Napoleon figure has been pushing the envelope for several weeks now since he hosted a conference on Ukraine in Paris on February 26 when he began publicly toying with the notion of sending NATO troops to Ukraine to combat Russia. This week, Russian foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin claimed that a contingent of 2,000 French military personnel were preparing to enter the Ukraine conflict. France’s military commanders vehemently dismissed the Russian intelligence claim, decrying it as an “irresponsible provocation”.

Just who is being provocative here? The alleged French deployment is consistent with the unhinged and belligerent rhetoric of French President Emmanuel Macron over the past three weeks during which he has been hinting at sending troops and of having “no red lines” to make sure that Russia does not win the war in Ukraine. Macron – like a puerile character – has also taken to goading other European leaders, notably his German counterpart, about not being “cowards” when it comes to supporting Ukraine. Let’s be clear. NATO soldiers and weapons have been in Ukraine since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 that installed a Russian-hating NeoNazi regime. The NATO proxy war has been targeting Russia for over a decade and killed more than 10,000 ethnic Russian civilians during a low-intensity war of aggression in formerly Eastern Ukraine. That aggression was finally countered when Russian forces intervened in Ukraine on February 24, 2022. However, the deployment of NATO combat battalions on the ground takes the conflict to the threshold of all-out war.

And Monsieur Macron appears to be willing to go there (while directing from his plush leather armchair in Elysée Palace and swirling a tumbler of vintage whiskey, bien sûr.) Russian President Vladimir Putin has said on several occasions – and most recently as of last week – that if Russia is threatened existentially, even with conventional weapons, then it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons for its defense. Putin warned that nuclear weapons exist to be used. The Russian doctrine for possible nuclear war is well-defined and long-established. Putin is not saber-rattling as the Western media stupidly make out. He is merely reminding potential enemies of the ultimate reality. Given the appalling stakes involved, it may seem bewildering that France’s Macron keeps talking about the possibility of deploying French and other NATO troops to fight in Ukraine. What is driving the French head of state to make such crass allusions?

First of all, it should be noted that such military contingents are crass from an objective military point of view. The deployment of 2,000 French troops would change nothing on the battlefield. They would be destroyed in two days, as American military analyst Scott Ritter points out. The risk is that the casualties inflicted on France would trigger other NATO members to intervene with greater numbers and firepower. That would lead to a spiraling escalation towards all-out nuclear war. As well as France, the Poles and Baltic states appear to be gung-ho about sending combat units. So, the French military contingency does not make sense from a military point of view, unless that is, the ulterior objective is to incite escalation. In other words, the French battle group is deliberately put forward as a sacrificial lamb to act as a tripwire for full NATO mobilization to war.

Read more …

“..by circumventing a clause in the bloc’s founding treaty..”

• EU Eyes ‘Groundbreaking’ Change On Ukraine Arms Funding (RT)

EU officials are seeking legal advice on how to unlock more military spending for Ukraine by circumventing a clause in the bloc’s founding treaty, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. The move would involve bypassing a section of the Treaty on European Union which forbids charging expenditure that has “military or defense implications” to the bloc’s joint budget. Such funding can be directly provided by member states, but individual governments can opt out of paying, even if they don’t vote against the spending itself. The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, has proposed a legal task force to evaluate whether the section in question, Article 41(2), can be circumvented so that it doesn’t prevent Brussels from buying weapons for Ukraine to support it in the conflict with Russia, four people familiar with the matter told the British newspaper. Kiev’s military effort against Russia is currently being funded through the European Peace Facility (EPF), which exists outside of the bloc’s joint budget.

The legal theory is that Article 41(2) should apply only to the EU’s own military programs and not foreign states, the FT reported. If the interpretation is applied, “it would be absolutely groundbreaking,” one source said. Talks, however, are at an early stage and may not end in Kiev’s favor, the newspaper reported. Even if changes are made, member states may challenge them in court. While many EU countries support military assistance for Ukraine, Hungary and Slovakia are in opposition. They argue that continued weapons deliveries merely result in more bloodshed, as opposed to a Russian defeat, and stand in the way of possible peace talks. There are also neutral members, such as Austria, which favor non-lethal assistance only. Last year the EU vowed to supply 1 million artillery shells to Ukraine by March 2024, but has failed to deliver on the pledge. Ukrainian officials have complained that assistance from Western donors has been lackluster in both amount and capability.

Read more …

“..medical commissions would no longer classify Ukrainian recruits as ‘fit for limited military service’. She argued that “this will make life easier for tens of thousands of people.”

• Ukraine Makes Fresh Move To Draft More Soldiers (RT)

Ukrainian recruits deemed ‘fit for limited military service’ could soon be thrown into the thick of the fighting after the nation’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, moved to abolish the term altogether. A bill to that effect was supported by the Rada on Thursday. According to the text, those who have been classified as fit for military service with restrictions would have to undergo a medical examination within the next nine months to determine their new health status, and whether they could be deployed to the front line. Those deemed fit for limited service could only be called up during time of war, and are not supposed to fill frontline positions, being allowed to serve only in support and rear units. The push to change conscription legislation comes amid calls from numerous officials in Kiev that every Ukrainian citizen should serve his country during the conflict with Russia. Commenting on the bill on national TV, Deputy Defense Minister Natalya Kalmykova said that medical commissions would no longer classify Ukrainian recruits as ‘fit for limited military service’. She argued that “this will make life easier for tens of thousands of people.”

“Both the service members and their relatives asked the Defense Ministry and other authorities to resolve this issue. We are very glad that the Verkhovna Rada has supported these changes,” she added. Meanwhile, since late December, Ukrainian lawmakers have been mulling a controversial bill that would lower the minimum conscription age from 27 to 25 to compensate for battlefield losses, with reported plans to call up around 500,000 troops. In early February, the legislation was passed in its first reading after numerous amendments. Later in the month, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu estimated Ukraine’s losses at more than 444,000 troops since the start of the conflict in February 2022. On Wednesday, the minister claimed that Kiev’s casualties had reached 71,000 troops this year alone, a figure he said was three times the losses during the same period last year. However, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claimed in February that Kiev had sustained only 31,000 soldiers killed since the start of the conflict. He did not disclose how many were injured or missing in action.

Read more …

“Unlike most Western leaders, Putin is on the side of his own citizens..”

• Washington In Denial Over Putin’s Victory While Gaming Its Own Elections (Cox)

America’s legacy media and political ruling class have thrown a predictably massive hissy fit over last weekend’s Russian election, insisting that President Vladimir Putin’s landslide victory was “preordained” and “stage-managed.” Every protest and anti-Putin statement before, during, and after the election was amplified. Every allegation of misconduct was reported with zero scrutiny or skepticism. Washington and its allies decried the results, arguing that the vote wasn’t free or fair. UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron went so far as to call it “illegal.” The pearl-clutching over Russia’s vote was the most intense I’ve ever seen over a foreign election. It was so inordinate, in fact, that it reminded me of the nonstop media coverage last month after Russian political activist Alexey Navalny died in a Siberian penal colony.

The same media that showed no concern over the death of US journalist Gonzalo Lira in a Ukrainian jail – after he had been tortured, at American taxpayer expense, for daring to criticize the Kiev regime – huffed and puffed for weeks about the death of a Russian citizen in a Russian prison. Lost in all the hysteria over Putin’s victory is the fact that most of the Russian people like their president. The incumbent won over 87% of the votes, and as even CNN begrudgingly acknowledged before the election, a poll last month showed that Putin had an 86% approval rating. That compares with a 9% approval rating for Navalny, the great Western hope for destabilizing Russia, in a January 2023 poll. And by the way, it also compares with US President Joe Biden’s approval rating of around 38%. As US policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs explained in an interview this week with Russia-hating podcaster Piers Morgan, Putin’s popularity and reelection reflect the will of the Russian people. “It’s part of Russian culture,” said Sachs, who advised the Moscow and Kiev governments after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

“He’s a strong leader. The Russian people expect a strong leader, and we have to deal with a strong leader in Russia.” Therein lies the problem. Team America is unwilling to accept strong leadership of Russia with broad public support. Having failed to cripple Russia or its leadership through the proxy war in Ukraine, the US and its allies are in no mood to accept the political reality in Moscow. The political pouting was so bad in Berlin that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government refused to refer to Putin as Russia’s president. This is the same government that is mulling plans to ban one of Germany’s most popular opposition parties. However, for all the Western criticism of Putin and his policies, it’s not easy to argue that he doesn’t try to represent the interests of the Russian people. Unlike most Western leaders, Putin is on the side of his own citizens. He hit the nail on the head when he said Western attacks were directed not at him, but at “the forces that stand behind me, which seek to strengthen Russia – to improve its sovereignty, defense, and economic independence.”

Read more …

“..he does not think China will ever invest in Israel again. “They see on their own social media networks what you and I are seeing..”

• World Sees Gaza as ‘US Genocide’ Not Just Israel’s (Sp.)

On Tuesday, four critical care doctors who recently returned from Gaza spoke to the UN. “I saw the most appalling atrocities, and I saw things I never would have expected to have seen in any healthcare setting,” Dr. Nick Maynard said, adding that he saw “mass indiscriminate bombing” and targeting of healthcare workers. Americans do not understand how badly the United States’ reputation has been damaged across the world, which sees Gaza as “a US genocide” and “not just an Israeli genocide,” Mohammad Marandi, a professor of English literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Thursday. “It’s revealing the reality of [the US] empire in a way that not even [author of ‘A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn] could do because it’s being done in front of our eyes, it’s being done in front of a global audience. We’ve never seen such a thing before,” Marandi said, adding that he suspects that is why the US is attempting to ban TikTok.

“The United States has lost credibility across the world. I don’t think many Americans understand how bad this has become for the United States. People across the world see this as a US genocide, it’s not just an Israeli genocide.” Co-host Wilmer Leon asked about a recent freeze on Canadian arms shipments to Israel, which Marandi said showed that “public opinion is shifting” but that ultimately “stopping Canadian exports of weapons is nothing.” Marandi said Canada needs to take a much tougher approach. “They sanctioned Syria… they’ve imposed sanctions on Cuba, on Venezuela, on Iran, on Yemen. Why don’t they impose sanctions on Israel? They’re carrying out a holocaust. Why don’t they hit the economy?” Marandi asked, noting that Israel will, unlike Russia, be allowed to participate in the Olympics. “No one takes this seriously. And, of course, the bulk of the weapons come from the United States anyway.”

“In any case, there is no reason to believe that the Canadian government cares about Palestinians, that they oppose the genocide because they’ve done absolutely nothing to stop it,” Marandi added. Ultimately, Marandi believes that Israel has laid the path for its destruction through its actions in Gaza. “I believe that the Israelis have made a fatal mistake and that what they’ve done in Gaza will be the beginning of the end of the Zionist project,” he asserted. “The real catastrophe for the Israeli regime is the fact that it’s been carrying out the genocide for almost six months in front of the world and it has demolished the facade that the regime had created for itself… about it being a democracy… All that is gone now and across the board the regime is despised and the image of the United States has been destroyed.” Marandi noted that he has been to China twice and public opinion there has shifted as well. He noted that he does not think China will ever invest in Israel again. “They see on their own social media networks what you and I are seeing,” he noted.

Read more …

“He’s Hunter’s confidant, art patron, business partner, and his lawyer. Now there is a suggestion that we might have to add CIA asset or protected person..”

• CIA Told DOJ to Stay Away from Kevin Morris in Hunter Biden Probe (Turley)

The New York Post has created a stir in Washington with its report that a whistleblower claims that the CIA reportedly blocked federal investigators from interviewing Kevin Morris, the entertainment lawyer who has subsidized the expenses and bought the art of Hunter Biden. (For full disclosure, Morris previously threatened me with a defamation lawsuit over my writing about his representation of Hunter. Fortunately, I have not received any summons from either the courts or the CIA). We will have to wait for more details on the allegations, but the response of the CIA struck me as rather curious. As discussed earlier, the Hollywood lawyer, producer and Democratic donor has emerged as a major figure in the corruption scandal surrounding Hunter Biden. For years, some of us have complained that we are not sure what Morris was at any given moment.

What became clear in the deposition is that Morris does not appear certain himself. He’s Hunter’s confidant, art patron, business partner, and his lawyer. Now there is a suggestion that we might have to add CIA asset or protected person. The unnamed whistleblower told the House Oversight and Judiciary that the “intelligence agency stopped IRS and Justice Department investigators from interviewing Morris in August 2021.” That has led Oversight chairman James Comer (R-KY) and Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) to demand answers from the CIA on whether two DOJ officials were summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. to discourage their interviewing Morris.

Given the allegations of special treatment by the Justice Department (including blocking efforts to interview Hunter or search Biden properties), the allegation is obviously quite serious. One would expect that the CIA would simply say that no such meeting related to the Hunter Biden investigation occurred. Instead, the agency responded that it “does not obstruct investigations.” The spokesman added “CIA does not comment on specific investigations. We can say that CIA cooperates with law enforcement partners and does not obstruct investigations. CIA also fully and routinely cooperates with our oversight committees and will continue to do so.”

Hunter met Morris when he attended a political fundraiser as a major donor. Soon thereafter, he warned Biden associates that Hunter’s unpaid taxes raised political problems during Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential run. He later proceeded to pay off Hunter’s taxes and to subsidize his lavish lifestyle. He also took an apparent lead in planning public campaigns against the critics of the Bidens, reportedly pushing a scorched-earth approach to attack potential witnesses and accusers. Then Morris seemed to take on the role of Hunter’s bank and art patron. He reportedly gave millions to Hunter while insisting that they are loans, not gifts. Most recently, it was revealed that, despite accounts of buyers flocking to buy Hunter’s overpriced art, it was Morris all along who bought most of the pieces. How the CIA would fit into any of this is anyone’s guess.

Read more …

“..why would you have 12 people armed with shotguns and machine guns, raid a doctor’s home in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and four years later never indict him?”

• CIA Protecting Biden by Blocking IRS Interviews – Whistleblower (DeMartino)

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jordan and Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman Comer revealed that a whistleblower told them the CIA intervened to prevent the IRS from interviewing Kevin Morris, an associate of Hunter Biden who loaned him millions of dollars, as part of the IRS investigation into the first son’s alleged tax crimes. The CIA said it would not comment on specific cases but added that while it cooperates with other law agencies, it does not interfere with investigations and claims to be fully cooperative with its oversight committees. Jordan and Comer have sent a letter to the CIA requesting more information, but have not yet received a response. They set a deadline for April 4, 2024. If the whistleblower’s testimony is true, it would represent an unprecedented move by the CIA that is tasked with countering foreign threats.

Brad Birkenfeld, a whistleblower who exposed tax fraud and money laundering schemes in the Swiss banking system, told Sputnik’s Political Misfits that the problem is that “so many people are trying to help the Bidens get out of the illegal conduct that they’re doing,” noting that he has himself attempted to provide investigators with information on the Hunter Biden case, but was met hostile response. “I was introduced to Dr. Keith Ablow, [who] was Hunter Biden’s psychiatrist,” Birkenfeld began. “He wanted me to help him with his whistleblowing case.” Birkenfeld says that Ablow told him things about Hunter Biden but that Ablow didn’t show for meetings that Birkenfeld set up for him in Washington. “Then I went to Senator [Charles] Grassley’s (R-IA) office and Senator [Ron] Johnson’s (R-WI) office, and I felt obligated as an American citizen to tell them about the information that [Ablow] had relayed to us,” including Hunter Biden’s involvement with Monkey Island, a Liquified Natural Gas company in Louisiana.

“Two days later, lo and behold, the Drug Enforcement Agency in Boston raided Dr. Keith Ablow’s home,” Birkenfeld continued. “[The DEA] took everything. Now, why would you have 12 people armed with shotguns and machine guns, raid a doctor’s home in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and four years later never indict him?” “Whatever the CIA does,” Birkenfeld added while discussing the CIA’s past, including their support of dictators Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Ferdinand Marcos, as well as their alleged efforts to undermine Donald Trump while he served as President. “Whatever the CIA does, this is like Cartoon Network over there in Langley. Yes, they do a job and some people work well. But there’s a lot of idiots over there that should be fired and prosecuted. And that’s the facts.”

Birkenfeld added earlier that Joe Biden -while serving as Vice President- was briefed in defense meetings “about his son interfering in US policies.” That, as of yet, has not been alleged by the committees investigating Hunter Biden but Birkenfeld insisted that it is “not conjecture.” “A lot of people don’t know this yet, but this is exactly what’s going to be coming out,” he asserted. While Democrats have consistently declared that the committees have yet to find any concrete evidence that President Biden committed any crimes, Birkenfeld argues that is because the power centers in Washington continue to obfuscate the case by blocking investigative efforts. “Give us the bank records, give us the credit cards offshore, and we can piece it together. But, once again, the Biden White House is obstructing, the DOJ is obstructing, the FBI is obstructing, the CIA [is] obstructing. So nobody can get the facts.”

Read more …

“..the potential causes of fertility decline, such as plastics and chemical shrinking penises and sperm counts, are relatively ignored..”

“In countries like South Korea and Japan, there are twice as many people dying as there are being born..”

• Global Population Set To Fall For First Time In 700 Years (MN)

A major study published in scientific journal The Lancet has found that the global population will start to fall within decades due to vastly reduced fertility rates and may never recover. The study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, found that by the year 2050, 155 of 204 countries are on course to have birth rates lower than required to sustain the population level. It notes that as of 2021, the “total fertility rate” worldwide was 2.23, hovering only just above the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain population growth. That figure has fallen from 4.84 in 1950, with researchers predicting it will decrease to 1.83 in 2050 and go as low as 1.59 by 2100. The study notes that by that time only 26 countries will have birth rates that outpace the number of people dying, with “most of the world transitioning into natural population decline”. A fall in population would mark the first time in seven centuries such an occurrence has taken place. The last time it happened was after the Black Death bubonic plague pandemic killed as many as 50 million people in the mid-1300s, reducing the global population from 400 million to 350 million.


Dramatic declines in global fertility rates set to transform global population patterns by 2100

Commenting on the study, it’s co-author Dr Natalia Bhattacharjee said declining fertility rates “will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will necessitate reorganising societies”. Bhattacharjee, lead research scientist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, also noted that a major consequence will be increased immigration from countries where there is still a “baby boom,” such as sub-Saharan Africa, in order to make up workforce shortages in nations with aging populations. Professor Stein Emil Vollset, senior author from IHME, also noted that the world is “facing staggering social change through the 21st century” due to population decline. The findings are exactly what the likes of Elon Musk have been warning of for years, describing population decline as a ‘civilisational threat’ and urging that humanity is literally going to disappear if something is not done to reverse the trend.

While Eco loons rage about ‘moral issues’ with having children, the potential causes of fertility decline, such as plastics and chemical shrinking penises and sperm counts, are relatively ignored. The stark reality is that birth rates globally are collapsing and almost every country is on course to have shrinking populations by the end of the century. In countries like South Korea and Japan, there are twice as many people dying as there are being born. You don’t have to be a mathematic genius to do the calculations on what’s going to happen very soon. These countries are already considering embracing mass migration, with South Korea’s Justice Minister recently declaring the country faces a “demographic catastrophe” and potential extinction otherwise. Despite this horrifying reality, it is now commonplace in modern culture for young people to genuinely believe they need to abandon their human instincts to reproduce, all for the greater good.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

McCullough: Spike proteins from Saliva
https://twitter.com/i/status/1770987637257413092

 

 

FDA loses its war on ivermectin and agrees to remove all social media posts and consumer directives regarding ivermectin and COVID, including its most popular tweet in FDA history.

 

 

Shark
https://twitter.com/i/status/1770998255851036861

 

 

Fish

 

 

Elephant
https://twitter.com/i/status/1771065184980742232
https://twitter.com/i/status/1771160969823027645

 

 

How?

 

 


Find “A”

 

 

Queen of the night

 

 

 

 

Deep-Sea Ghost Shark

 

 

Lion up close

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.